Simulating connection dropouts in BitTorrent environments

With the advance of Peer-to-Peer solutions, research and commercial players have shown interest in enhancing local client and overall swarm performance in order to improve content distribution and user satisfaction. Protocol measurements and careful client and swarm simulation and behavior analysis are required to provide valuable information on improving performance. In this paper we analyse the possibility of simulating realistic network dropout behavior in the testing infrastructures. Three possible solutions are presented: terminating client processes, suspending them and disabling the network interface. A series of experiments are run to compare the solutions.