Influences on cooperation in BitTorrent communities

ABSTRACT

We collect BitTorrent usage data across multiple file-sharing communities and analyze the factors that affect users' cooperative behavior. We find evidence that the design of the BitTorrent protocol results in increased cooperative behavior over other P2P protocols used to share similar content (e.g. Gnutella). We also investigate two additional community-specific mechanisms that foster even more cooperation.

REFERENCES

• 1: E. Adar and B. Huberman. Free Riding on Gnutella. First Monday, 5(10), October 2000.
• 2: Ashwin R. Bharambe , Cormac Herley , Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Some observations on bitTorrent performance, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, June 06-10, 2005, Banff, Alberta, Canada
• 3: BitTorrent, Inc. BitTorrent web site, 2001--2005. http://www.bittorrent.com.
• 4: J. Bond. RSS FAQ. http://www.voidstar.com/module.php? id=129&mod=book&op=feed.
• 5: CacheLogic. The true picture of peer-to-peer filesharing. http://www.cachelogic.com/research, July 2004.
• 6: B. Cohen. Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent. In Proc. Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, Berkeley CA, USA, June 2003.
• 7: M. Feldman, K. Lai, J. Chuang, and I. Stoica. Quantifying disincentives in peer-to-peer networks. In Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, June 2003.
• 8: P. R. Hinton. Statistics Explained. Routledge, 2004.
• 9: Daniel Hughes , Geoff Coulson , James Walkerdine, Free Riding on Gnutella Revisited: The Bell Tolls?, IEEE Distributed Systems Online, v.6 n.6, p.1, June 2005 [doi>10.1109/MDSO.2005.31]
• 10: M. Izal, G. Urvoy-Keller, E. W. Biersack, P. Felber, A. A. Hamra, and L. Garcés-Erice. Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent's Lifetime. In Proc. Passive and Active Measurements (PAM2004), Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France, April 2004.
• 11: Jupiter (Easytree Chief Moderator). Personal communication, March 2005.
• 12: Monkey Methods research group. Monkeyin' around: Is BitTorrent dead? http://monkeymethods.org/pubs/is-bittorrent-dead-centralization-analysis.htm, Jan. 2005.
• 13: J. Pouwelse, P. Garbacki, D. Epema, and H. Sips. The Bittorrent P2P File-sharing System: Measurements and Analysis. In 4th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'05), Feb. 2005. http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~pouwelse/Bittorrent_Measurements_6pages.pdf.
• 14: Dongyu Qiu , R. Srikant, Modeling and performance analysis of BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.34 n.4, October 2004
• 15: S. Saroiu, P. K. Gummadi, and S. D. Gribble. A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems. In Proc. Multimedia Computing and Networking 2002 (MMCN '02), San Jose CA, USA, January 2002. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/mmcn.pdf.
• 16: M. J. Wielaard. The Hunting of the Snark Project - BitTorrent Application Suite. http://www.klomp.org/snark/, 2003.
• 17: Wikipedia. Bootleg recording. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleg_recording, 2005.
• 18: M. Yang, Z. Zhang, X. Li, and Y. Dai. An empirical study of free-riding behavior in the Maze P2P file-sharing system. In IPTPS '05, Feb. 2005.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Performance attributes

  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

General Terms:
Measurement

Keywords:
BitTorrent, P2P, cooperation