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

Claudio Testa (1, 2) , D. Rossi (1, 2) , Ashwin Rao (3) , Arnaud Legout (3)

1 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information
2 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences
3 PLANETE - Protocols and applications for the Internet

{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. Exper- iments 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.

Keywords: p2p; bittorrent; ledbat

Domains: Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]

Claudio Testa, D. Rossi, Ashwin Rao, Arnaud Legout. Experimental Assessment of BitTorrent Completion Time in Heterogeneous TCP/uTP swarms. Traffic Measurement and Analysis (TMA) Workshop at Passive and Active Measurement (PAM), Mar 2012, Wien, Australia. pp.52-65. ⟨hal-00795818⟩