An analysis of user behavior in a private BitTorrent community.

SUMMARY This paper aims to develop an understanding on how users of private BitTorrent communities participate in downloading and uploading by using the download records of CHDBits, one of the largest private BitTorrent communities in China. First, we investigate the arrivals of CHDBits users, which correspond to the initiations of new download tasks. The investigation demonstrates that user arrival rate varies with time in a day, and this variation dovetails well into users' daily schedule. Moreover, we observe that it is with more than half possibility that the two consecutive arrivals of a CHDBits user take place in the same day, and that an individual user issues new download tasks with a probability of 0.23, on which we base to estimate that all CHDBits users are expected to launch at least one new download task in 42 days. Second, we present an analysis on the post-download behavior of users. We observe that the average per task seeding time of 99% of users is no less than 8 h, showing CHDBits users' great willingness to contribute. We also find that almost all the seeding processes have been interrupted and resumed multiple times. Finally, we study the bandwidth distribution of users and evaluate users' bandwidth utilization in the downloading process. Our study shows that the bandwidths of most CHDBits users are uniformly distributed in the range from 256 kB/s to 16 MB/s, and users with a higher bandwidth tend to experience a lower bandwidth utilization. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]