ISP friendly peer selection in bittorrent

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications provides services such as content sharing, video-on-demand, voice-over-IP which are very popular among Internet users and it accounts for a significant amount of global internet traffic. Use of overlay networks pose significant new challenges to Internet Service Providers (ISP). In order to reduce operational costs ISP are throttling or blocking P2P traffic which is unfavourable for a majority of internet users. In this paper, we design and evaluate an approach of reducing these costs when using BitTorrent P2P applications. Our approach involves of using knowledge of network paths that can be gathered in trackers and using it to bias the peer selection without any modification to any client software. Using the results of an evaluation of nearly 300 users in PlanetLab testbed the proposed approach will reduce cross-ISP traffic by 44% while improving in download speed (40%) and upload speed (39%).