Experimental assessment of BitTorrent completion time in heterogeneous TCP/uTP swarms

Speaker : Claudio Testa
Telecom ParisTech
Date: 29/02/2012
Time: 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Location: LINCS Meeting Room 40

Abstract

Preview of talk/ workshop at PAM 2012.

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. Experiments 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.

Joint work with D. Rossi (Telecom ParisTech), A. Rao (INRIA) and A. Legout (INRIA).