Simulating BitTorrent

ABSTRACT

IP Television (IPTV) and other media distribution applications are expected to be one of the next Internet killer applications. One indication of this is the corporate backing that the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is getting. However, the bandwidth utilization of these applications is still an issue, as the volume of multimedia grows due to larger image resolution and higher bitrate audio. One way of managing this increase in bandwidth requirements is to use existing end-host bandwidth to decrease the load on the content server in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fashion. One of the most successful P2P applications is BitTorrent (BT), a swarming file transfer system. This paper presents an implementation of a BT simulator intended for future use in investigating modifications to the BT system to provide streaming media capabilities. The simulator is validated against real-world measurements and a brief performance analysis is provided.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols
          Subjects: Applications (SMTP, FTP, etc.)

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

Keywords:
BitTorrent, P2P, multimedia, simulation, streaming, video-on-demand