GnutellaBT: Merging gnutella and BitTorrent for efficient P2P resource sharing

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is an important Internet application. Among lots of P2P systems, BitTorrent is the most efficient P2P collaborative file sharing protocol and the de facto standard of this kind of system. However, BitTorrent protocol requires publishing the Torrent file by Web and allocating neighbors by a dedicated tracker. These requirements hinder the usage of this protocol. In this paper, we propose a Gnutella network-based trackerless P2P collaborative file sharing system, called GnutellaBT, in which the publishing of Torrent file by Web is substituted by the resource locating function of a Gnutella network. The allocation of neighbors is performed by random walk on a specific Torrent network. A two-tier architecture and related algorithms are presented. This new system doesn´t require the support of Web servers and dedicated tracker nodes. The simulations show that GnutellaBT can provide efficient Torrent file locating function. The random walk-based neighbor selection is as efficient as that of the tracker-based allocation. The most important advantage of GnutellaBT is that it decouples P2P file sharing from Web and trackers.