A Measurement Study on Resource Popularity and Swarm Evolution of BitTorrent System

Abstract

Analyzing and modeling of the BitTorrent (BT) resource popularity and swarm evolution is important for better understanding current BT system and designing accurate BT simulators. Although lots of measurement studies on BT almost cover each important aspect, little work reflects the recent development of BT system. In this paper, we develop a hybrid measurement system incorporating both active and passive approaches. By exploiting DHT (Distribute Hash Table) and PEX (Peer Exchange) protocols, we collect more extensive information compared to prior measurement systems. Based on the measurement results, we study the resource popularity and swarm evolution with different population in minute/ hour/day scales, and discover that: 1) the resources in BT system appear obvious unbalanced distribution and hotspot phenomenon, in that 74.6% torrents have no more than 1000 peers; 2) The lifetime of torrents can be divided into a fast growing stage, a dramatically shrinking stage, a sustaining stage and a slowly fading out stage in terms of swarm population; 3) Users’ interest and diurnal periodicity are the main factors that influence the swarm evolution. The former dominates the first two stages, while the latter is decisive in the third stage. We raise an improved peer arrival rate model to describe the variation of the swarm population. Comparison results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach according to root mean square error and correlation coefficient.

Share and Cite:

M. Su, H. Zhang, B. Fang and L. Ye, "A Measurement Study on Resource Popularity and Swarm Evolution of BitTorrent System," International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences, Vol. 6 No. 6, 2013, pp. 300-308. doi: 10.4236/ijcns.2013.66032.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1] J. A. Pouwelse, P. Garbacki, D. H. J. Epema and H. J. Sips, “The BitTorrent P2P File-Sharing System: Measurements and Analysis,” Proceedings of 4th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer System, Ithaca, 24-25 February 2005, pp. 205-216. doi:10.1007/11558989_19
[2] G. Neglia, G. Reina and H. G. Zhang, “Availability in BitTorrent System,” Proceeding of 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, Anchorage, 2007, pp. 2216-2224.
[3] D. Erman, D. Ilie and A. Popescu, “BitTorrent Traffic Characteristics,” Proceedings of the International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology, Bucharest, 1-3 August 2006, pp. 42-48.
[4] P. Dhungel, X. Hei, D. Wu and K. W. Ross, “A Measurement Study of Attacks on BitTorrent Seeds,” Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications, Kyoto, 2011.
[5] D. Y. Qiu and R Srikant, “Modeling and Performance Analysis of Bittorrent-Like Peer-to-Peer Networks,” Proceedings of SIGCOMM ‘04, Portland, 2004, pp. 367-378. doi:10.1145/1015467.1015508
[6] J. Pouwelse, P. Garbacki, D. Epema and H. Sips, “The Bittorrent P2P File-Sharing System: Measurements and Analysis,” Proceedings of IPTPS’05, Ithaca, 24-25 February 2005, pp. 205-216.
[7] L. Guo, S. Q. Chen, Z. Xiao, E. Tan, X. Ding and X. Zhang, “Measurements, Analysis, and Modeling of Bit-Torrent-Like Systems,” Proceedings of IMC’05, Berkely, 19-21 October 2005.
[8] K. Katsaros, V. P. Kemerlis, C. Stais and G. Xylomenos, “A BitTorrent Module for the OMNeT++ Simulator,” Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis & Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS ‘09), London, 2009.
[9] L. Ye, H. Zhang, F. Li and M. Su, “A Measurement Study on BitTorrent System,” International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences, Vol. 3 No. 12, 2010, pp. 916-924. doi:10.4236/ijcns.2010.312125
[10] D. Stutzbach, R. Rejaie and S. Sen, “Characterizing Unstructured Overlay Topologies in Modern P2P File-Sharing Systems,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2008, pp. 267-280.
[11] S. Saroiu, K. P. Gummadi and S. D. Gribble, “Measuring and Analyzing the Characteristics of Napster and Gnutella Hosts,” Multimedia Systems, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2003, pp. 170-184. doi:10.1007/s00530-003-0088-1
[12] L. Vu, I. Gupta, K. Nahrstedt and J. Liang, “Understanding Overlay Characteristics of a Large-scale Peer-to-Peer IPTV System,” ACM Transactions on Multimedia, Computing, Communication and Application, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2010, pp. 1-24. doi:10.1145/1865106.1865115
[13] Z. B. Guo and Z. D. Qiu, “Measurement and Modeling of the Peer-to-Peer Sharing Objects Popularity,” Journal on Communications, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2009, pp. 66-74.
[14] D. Erman and A. Popescu, “BitTorrent Request Message Models,” Proceedings of 3rd Swedish National Computer Networking Workshop, Halmstad, 23-24 November 2005.
[15] Y. Tian, D. Wu and K. W. Ng, “Modeling, Analysis and Improvement for BitTorrent-Like File Sharing Networks,” Proceedings of INFOCOM’06, Barcelona, 2006.
[16] http://www.suprnova.org
[17] S. Petrovic and P. Brown, “Fluid Model for eMule File Sharing System,” Proceedings of 4th European Conference on Universal Multiservice Networks (ECUMN ‘07), Washington DC, 14-16 February 2007, pp. 273-282. doi:10.1109/ECUMN.2007.21
[18] B. Fan, D. M. Chiu and J. C. S, Lui, “Stochastic Differential Equation Approach to Model BitTorrent-Like P2P Systems,” Proceedings of ICC ‘06, Istanbul, 2006, pp. 915-920.
[19] P. Li, J. C. S. Lui and Y. L. Xu, “A Stochastic Model for BitTorrent-Like Systems,” Proceedings of SIGMETRICS’08, New York, 2008, pp. 116-118. doi:10.1145/1375457
[20] M. Su, H. Zhang, B. Fang and N. Yan, “A Measurement Study on Swarm Evolution of BitTorrent,” Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Enabled Distributed Computing and Knowledge Discovery (CyberC 2012), Sanya, 2012, pp. 512-518.

Copyright © 2024 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

Creative Commons License

This work and the related PDF file are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.