568 research outputs found
A New Stable Peer-to-Peer Protocol with Non-persistent Peers
Recent studies have suggested that the stability of peer-to-peer networks may
rely on persistent peers, who dwell on the network after they obtain the entire
file. In the absence of such peers, one piece becomes extremely rare in the
network, which leads to instability. Technological developments, however, are
poised to reduce the incidence of persistent peers, giving rise to a need for a
protocol that guarantees stability with non-persistent peers. We propose a
novel peer-to-peer protocol, the group suppression protocol, to ensure the
stability of peer-to-peer networks under the scenario that all the peers adopt
non-persistent behavior. Using a suitable Lyapunov potential function, the
group suppression protocol is proven to be stable when the file is broken into
two pieces, and detailed experiments demonstrate the stability of the protocol
for arbitrary number of pieces. We define and simulate a decentralized version
of this protocol for practical applications. Straightforward incorporation of
the group suppression protocol into BitTorrent while retaining most of
BitTorrent's core mechanisms is also presented. Subsequent simulations show
that under certain assumptions, BitTorrent with the official protocol cannot
escape from the missing piece syndrome, but BitTorrent with group suppression
does.Comment: There are only a couple of minor changes in this version. Simulation
tool is specified this time. Some repetitive figures are remove
Modeling and Control of Rare Segments in BitTorrent with Epidemic Dynamics
Despite its existing incentives for leecher cooperation, BitTorrent file
sharing fundamentally relies on the presence of seeder peers. Seeder peers
essentially operate outside the BitTorrent incentives, with two caveats: slow
downlinks lead to increased numbers of "temporary" seeders (who left their
console, but will terminate their seeder role when they return), and the
copyright liability boon that file segmentation offers for permanent seeders.
Using a simple epidemic model for a two-segment BitTorrent swarm, we focus on
the BitTorrent rule to disseminate the (locally) rarest segments first. With
our model, we show that the rarest-segment first rule minimizes transition time
to seeder (complete file acquisition) and equalizes the segment populations in
steady-state. We discuss how alternative dissemination rules may {\em
beneficially increase} file acquisition times causing leechers to remain in the
system longer (particularly as temporary seeders). The result is that leechers
are further enticed to cooperate. This eliminates the threat of extinction of
rare segments which is prevented by the needed presence of permanent seeders.
Our model allows us to study the corresponding trade-offs between performance
improvement, load on permanent seeders, and content availability, which we
leave for future work. Finally, interpreting the two-segment model as one
involving a rare segment and a "lumped" segment representing the rest, we study
a model that jointly considers control of rare segments and different uplinks
causing "choking," where high-uplink peers will not engage in certain
transactions with low-uplink peers.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, A shorter version of this paper that did not
include the N-segment lumped model was presented in May 2011 at IEEE ICC,
Kyot
Pushing BitTorrent Locality to the Limit
Peer-to-peer (P2P) locality has recently raised a lot of interest in the
community. Indeed, whereas P2P content distribution enables financial savings
for the content providers, it dramatically increases the traffic on inter-ISP
links. To solve this issue, the idea to keep a fraction of the P2P traffic
local to each ISP was introduced a few years ago. Since then, P2P solutions
exploiting locality have been introduced. However, several fundamental issues
on locality still need to be explored. In particular, how far can we push
locality, and what is, at the scale of the Internet, the reduction of traffic
that can be achieved with locality? In this paper, we perform extensive
experiments on a controlled environment with up to 10 000 BitTorrent clients to
evaluate the impact of high locality on inter-ISP links traffic and peers
download completion time. We introduce two simple mechanisms that make high
locality possible in challenging scenarios and we show that we save up to
several orders of magnitude inter-ISP traffic compared to traditional locality
without adversely impacting peers download completion time. In addition, we
crawled 214 443 torrents representing 6 113 224 unique peers spread among 9 605
ASes. We show that whereas the torrents we crawled generated 11.6 petabytes of
inter-ISP traffic, our locality policy implemented for all torrents would have
reduced the global inter-ISP traffic by 40%
CLOSER: A Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice
Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems make use of a considerable percentage of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bandwidth. This paper presents the Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice (CLOSER), an architecture that aims at lessening the usage of expensive international links by exploiting traffic locality (i.e., a resource is downloaded from the inside of the ISP whenever possible). The paper proves the effectiveness of CLOSER by analysis and simulation, also comparing this architecture with existing solutions for traffic locality in P2P systems. While savings on international links can be attractive for ISPs, it is necessary to offer some features that can be of interest for users to favor a wide adoption of the application. For this reason, CLOSER also introduces a privacy module that may arouse the users' interest and encourage them to switch to the new architectur
Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven
BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where
individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other
users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the
availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However,
apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often
copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for user who publish the
material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major)
content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives
such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more
than 55k torrents in 2 major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We
demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers are responsible for 66% of
published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that
these major publishers respond to two different profiles. On one hand,
antipiracy agencies and malicious publishers publish a large amount of fake
files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the
other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies
with financial incentive. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or
are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at
least their associated traffic will significantly reduce
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