Title: A teamwork approach to improving the downloading time in BitTorrent-like systems

Authors: Hong Tang; Hai Cen Shen; Cong-Cong Xing

Addresses: Research Center of Network and Computing, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, 400065, China ' Research Center of Network and Computing, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, 400065, China ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA 70310, USA

Abstract: It is well known that the content distribution system based on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has become the primary means for the majority of internet users to share their files, and that BitTorrent (BT), as the most popular technology in P2P systems, generates a huge amount of traffic on the internet with a plethora of clients. Unfortunately, owing to the inadequate consideration on minimising the user downloading time in the design of BT, clients of BT may experience a substantially long downloading time during their file-sharing activities. Towards resolving this issue, a new teamwork mechanism to improve the overall downloading performance of BT clients is proposed in this paper. A team is formed by a group of nodes which possess similar bandwidths, have the same content interests, and collaborate with one another for common benefits. Our experiments show that a 20%-62% improvement in downloading time can be achieved by this teamwork strategy.

Keywords: peer-to-peer; P2P networks; BitTorrent; teamwork; download time; file sharing; downloading performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2016.076939

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2016 Vol.12 No.4, pp.319 - 329

Received: 28 Jun 2013
Accepted: 28 Oct 2013

Published online: 08 Jun 2016 *

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