Zero-Day Reconciliation of BitTorrent Users With Their ISPs

Abstract

BitTorrent users and consumer ISPs are often pictured as having opposite interests, with end-users aggressively trying to improve their download times, while ISPs throttle this traffic to reduce their costs. However, inefficiencies in both download time and quantity of long-distance traffic originate in BitTorrent randomly selecting peers to interact with. We show that biasing the link selection allows one to reduce both median download times by up to 32% and long-distance traffic by up to 16%. This optimization can be deployed by modifying only the BitTorrent trackers. No external infrastructure nor specialized client-side software deployment is necessary, thereby facilitating the adoption of our technique.

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Bibtex Entry

@InProceedings{,
  author =       {Marco Slot and Paolo Costa and Guillaume Pierre 
                  and Vivek Rai},
  title =        {Zero-Day Reconciliation of {BitTorrent} Users 
                  With Their {ISPs}},
  booktitle =    {Proceedings of the Euro-Par Conference},
  address =      {Delft, The Netherlands},
  month =        aug,
  year =         {2009},
  note =         {\url{http://www.globule.org/publi/ZDRBUI_europar2009.html}}
}