Understanding BitTorrent’s Suitability in Various Applications and Environments
Key: KSKS08-1
Author: Sebastian Kaune, Jan Stolzenburg, Aleksandra Kovacevic, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: July 2008
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: IEEE Computer Society Press
Book title: The Third International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology (ComP2P '08)
Abstract: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have recently emerged as an attractive alternative to client/server approaches, especially in the area of content distribution. By efficiently leveraging the available upload bandwidth of the end users, BitTorrent becomes a de facto standard for scalable content distribution. Inspired by its success, many companies try to shift the major upload burden from their rented source servers to end users by using this protocol, since many hosting sites charge them based on the used egress capacity. For instance, Blizzard Entertainment spreads patches, videos and demos of the successful online game “World of Warcraft” to interested parties by using a specific BitTorrent client. In this paper, we perform an in-depth study of the overall performance of BitTorrent in its entirety, in order to get a broader understanding of its suitability for different applications domains. We analyse its performance from a bifocal perspective, namely that of the content providers and that of the end users, and in this context, we give answers to interesting questions.

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