Downloading trace study for BitTorrent P2P performance measurement and analysis

With the increasing client population and the explosive volume of Internet media content, the peer-to-peer networking technologies and systems provide a rapid and scalable content distribution mechanism in the global networks. The BitTorrent protocol and its derivatives are among the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications, which contribute a dominant fraction of today’s Internet traffic. In this paper, we conduct the performance measurement and analysis of BitTorrent systems with an extensive volume of real trace logs. We use several downloading-side metrics, including overall downloading time, maximum of downloading bandwidth, average bandwidth utilization, maximum of downloading connections, and average number of active connections, to derive various interesting results from the downloading-side aspect of network resource usage. Performance examination learns many new observations and characteristics into the virtue of BitTorrent protocols and systems, thereby providing beneficial information for bandwidth allocation and connection control in BitTorrent client applications. Therefore, this study is complementary to many previous research works that mainly focused on system-oriented and uploading-side performance measurements.