Measuring Bittorrent Ecosystems

Carmen Guerrero López Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Avda de la Universidad, 30 E-28911 Leganés (Madrid) Spain

Email: carmen.guerrero@uc3m.es

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

BitTorrent is the most successful peer-to-peer application. In the last years the research community has studied the BitTorrent ecosystem by collecting data from real BitTorrent swarms using different measurement techniques. In this talk we present the first survey of these techniques that constitutes a first step in the design of future measurement techniques and tools for analyzing large scale systems. The techniques are classified into Macroscopic, Microscopic and Complementary. Macroscopic techniques allow to collect aggregated information of torrents and present a very high scalability being able to monitor up to hundreds of thousands of torrents in short periods of time. Rather, Microscopic techniques operate at the peer level and focus on understanding performance aspects such as the peers’ download rates. They offer a higher granularity but do not scale as well as the Macroscopic techniques. Finally, Complementary techniques utilize recent extensions to the BitTorrent protocol in order to obtain both aggregated and peer level information. The talk also summarizes the main challenges faced by the research community to accurately measure the BitTorrent ecosystem such as accurately identifying peers or estimating peers’ upload rates. Furthermore, we provide possible solutions to address the described challenges.

Keywords: Bittorrent, p2p, measurement, crawling,

dataset

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This invited talk is based on joint work conducted jointly

with the following collaborators: Michail Kryczka (Institute IMDEA Networks and University Carlos III de Madrid), Ruben Cuevas (University Carlos III de Madrid), Arturo Azcorra (Institute IMDEA Networks and University Carlos III de Madrid), Angel Cuevas (Institute Telecom, Telecom SudParis), Reza Rejae (University of Oregon), Sebastian Kaune (Technical University of Darmstadt).

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) through the TREND NoE project (grant agreement no. 25774), the Regional Government of Madrid through the MEDIANET project (S-2009/TIC-1468) and the National Grant eeCONTENT (TEC2011-29688-C02-02).

BIOGRAPHY CARMEN GUERRERO received her Telecommunication

Engineering degree in 1994 from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1998 from the Universidade da Coruna (UDC), Spain. She is currently Associate Professor since 2003 in the Telematics Engineering Department and Senior Researcher at the Network and Communication Technologies (NETCOM) research group both at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Her current research interest are large scale distributed systems, social networks, content distribution, Internet measurements and green networking. More information at: www.it.uc3m.es/carmen.

REFERENCES [1] Kryczka, M. Cuevas, R. ; Guerrero, C. ; Azcorra, A. ; Cuevas, A.

“Measuring the BitTorrent Ecosystem: Techniques, Tips, and Tricks”. IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 49, Issue: 9, pp. 144-152, ISSN: 0163-6804, September 2011

[2] R. Cuevas, M. Kryczka, A. Cuevas, S. Kaune, C. Guerrero, and Rejaie.R. “Is content publishing in bittorrent altruistic or profit-driven?” In ACM CoNEXT 2010

[3] S. Kaune, R. Cuevas, G. Tyson, A. Mauthe, C. Guerrero, and R. Steinmetz. “Unraveling BitTorrent’s File Unavailability: Measurements, Analysis and Solution Exploration. In IEEE P2P’10, 2010.

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