BTLab: A System-Centric, Data-Driven Analysis and Measurement Platform for BitTorrent Clients

Author

Szydlowski, Martin ; Zhao, Ben Y. ; Kirda, Engin ; Kruegel, Christopher

Author_Institution

Vienna Univ. of Technol., Vienna, Austria

fYear

2011

fDate

July 31 2011-Aug. 4 2011

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

We present BTLab, a distributed platform to measure and analyze the differences between BitTorrent clients. Due to extensibility, and a certain vagueness in the BitTorrent specification, many clients diverge in some aspects from each other. Most research to date disregarded the effects of these differences. BTLab allows us to create and control BitTorrent swarms, composed of hundreds of clients of our choice. We use captured network traffic to measure the performance and uncover the reasons for observed differences. For our experiments, we deployed BTLab on a cluster and on Planetlab and selected four popular BitTorrent clients. Our analysis reveals flaws in piece selection and connection management algorithms that adversely affect the performance of some clients.

Keywords

peer-to-peer computing; BTLab; BitTorrent clients; BitTorrent specification; BitTorrent swarm control; Planetlab; connection management algorithms; data-driven analysis; distributed platform; measurement platform; network traffic; piece selection; system-centric analysis; Bandwidth; Correlation; Extraterrestrial measurements; Internet; Monitoring; Peer to peer computing; Protocols;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), 2011 Proceedings of 20th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Maui, HI

ISSN

1095-2055

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0637-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCCN.2011.6005925

Filename

6005925