Clustering and Sharing Incentives in BitTorrent Systems

Peer-to-peer protocols play an increasingly instrumental role in Internet content distribution. It is therefore important to gain a complete understanding of how these protocols behave in practice and how their operating parameters affect overall system performance. This paper presents the first detailed experimental investigation of the peer selection strategy in the popular BitTorrent protocol. By observing more than 40 nodes in instrumented private torrents, we validate three protocol properties that, though believed to hold, have not been previously demonstrated experimentally: the clustering of similar-bandwidth peers, the effectiveness of BitTorrent's sharing incentives, and the peers' high uplink utilization. In addition, we observe that BitTorrent's modified choking algorithm in seed state provides uniform service to all peers, and that an underprovisioned initial seed leads to absence of peer clustering and less effective sharing incentives. Based on our results, we provide guidelines for seed provisioning by content providers, and discuss a tracker protocol extension that addresses an identified limitation of the protocol.
Comment: This article is the author version of a paper accepted at ACM SIGMETRICS'2007. In particular, this paper is different from the technical report inria-00112066, version 1 - 21 November 2006. The technical report inria-00112066, version 1 - 21 November 2006 is a extended version of this paper (same title and authors, but different content) Version 2 is the same content as version 1, but with a different class in order to match the camera ready format for SIGMETRICS