Skip to main content

Experimental Assessment of BitTorrent Completion Time in Heterogeneous TCP/uTP Swarms

  • Conference paper

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCCN,volume 7189)

Abstract

BitTorrent, one of the most widespread used P2P application for file-sharing, recently got rid of TCP by introducing an application-level congestion control protocol named uTP. The aim of this new protocol is to efficiently use the available link capacity, while minimizing its interference with the rest of user traffic (e.g., Web, VoIP and gaming) sharing the same access bottleneck.

In this paper we perform an experimental study of the impact of uTP on the torrent completion time, the metric that better captures the user experience. We run BitTorrent applications in a flash crowd scenario over a dedicated cluster platform, under both homogeneous and heterogeneous swarm population. Experiments show that an all-uTP swarms have shorter torrent download time with respect to all-TCP swarms. Interestingly, at the same time, we observe that even shorter completion times can be achieved under mixtures of TCP and uTP traffic, as in the default BitTorrent settings.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   69.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Alcock, S., Nelson, R.: Application flow control in youtube video streams. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 41(2), 24–30 (2011)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  2. Bonfiglio, D., Mellia, M., Meo, M., Rossi, D.: Detailed analysis of skype traffic. IEEE Transaction on Multimedia 11(1), 117–127 (2009)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  3. Shalunov, S.e.a.: Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT). IETF Draft (October 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Norberg, A.: BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals on μTorrent transport protocol (2009), http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html

  5. IETF: LEDBAT Working Group Charter, http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ledbat/charter/

  6. Schneider, J., Wagner, J., Winter, R., Kolbe, H.: Out of my Way – Evaluating Low Extra Delay Background Transport in an ADSL Acciess Network. In: 22nd International Teletraffic Congress (ITC22), Amsterdam, The Netherlands (September 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Rossi, D., Testa, C., Valenti, S.: Yes, We LEDBAT: Playing with the New BitTorrent Congestion Control Algorithm. In: Krishnamurthy, A., Plattner, B. (eds.) PAM 2010. LNCS, vol. 6032, pp. 31–40. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  8. Morris, S.: μTorrent release 1.9 alpha 13485 (December 2008), http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=379206#p379206

  9. Testa, C., Rossi, D.: The impact of utp on bittorrent completion time. In: 11th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), Kyoto, Japan (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  10. https://www.grid5000.fr

  11. Venkataramani, A., Kokku, R., Dahlin, M.: TCP Nice: A mechanism for background transfers. In: 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Boston, MA (December 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kuzmanovic, A., Knightly, E.: TCP-LP: low-priority service via end-point congestion control. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) 14(4), 752 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Liu, S., Vojnovic, M., Gunawardena, D.: 4cp: Competitive and considerate congestion control protocol. In: ACM SIGCOMM, Pisa, Italy (September 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Qiu, D., Srikant, R.: Modeling and performance analysis of BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks. ACM SIGCOMM Comp. Comm. Rev. 34(4), 367–378 (2004)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  15. Rao, A., Legout, A., Dabbous, W.: Can realistic bittorrent experiments be performed on clusters? In: 10th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), pp. 1–10 (August 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Legout, A., Liogkas, N., Kohler, E., Zhang, L.: Clustering and sharing incentives in bittorrent systems. In: Proc. of ACM SIGMETRICS 2007, San Diego, CA, USA (June 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Cohen, B., Norberg, A.: Correcting for clock drift in uTP and LEDBAT. Invited talk at 9th USENIX International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 2010), San Jose, CA (April 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Rossi, D., Testa, C., Valenti, S., Muscariello, L.: LEDBAT: the new BitTorrent congestion control protocol. In: 19th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2010), Zurich, Switzerland (August 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Carofiglio, G., Muscariello, L., Rossi, D., Valenti, S.: The quest for LEDBAT fairness. In: IEEE Global Communication (GLOBECOM 2010), Miami, FL (December 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Carofiglio, G., Muscariello, L., Rossi, D., Testa, C.: A hands-on Assessment of Transport Protocols with Lower than Best Effort Priority. In: 35th IEEE Local Computer Network (LCN 2010), Denver, CO (October 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Bhooma, P.: Measurements using the LEDBAT implementation for MAX OS X, http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ledbat/current/msg00532.html

  22. Abu, A., Gordon, S.: A Dynamic Algorithm for Stabilising LEDBAT Congestion Window. In: 2nd IEEE International Conference on Computer and Network Technology (ICCNT 2010), Bangkok, Thailand (April 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  23. http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~testa/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.BTtestbed

  24. Mogul, J.C.: Tcp offload is a dumb idea whose time has come. In: 9th Conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, vol. 9, p. 5. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Akella, A., Seshan, S., Shaikh, A.: An empirical evaluation of wide-area internet bottlenecks. In: Proc. of the 3rd ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement (IMC 2003), Miami, FL, USA (October 2003)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

About this paper

Cite this paper

Testa, C., Rossi, D., Rao, A., Legout, A. (2012). Experimental Assessment of BitTorrent Completion Time in Heterogeneous TCP/uTP Swarms. In: Pescapè, A., Salgarelli, L., Dimitropoulos, X. (eds) Traffic Monitoring and Analysis. TMA 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7189. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28534-9_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28534-9_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28533-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28534-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)