Monday, April 27, 2009

Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent

This paper presents a piece of good software. The idea behind bittorrent is to download file chunks in parallel from multiple peers. Chunk order is rarest piece first to increase overall presence of the file. The peers are found through a tracker (server) who's address is hard coded in the torrent file. Each peer selfishly allows other peers to download from it based on reciprocal downloads and to avoid oscillations, this is done or a larger time scale.

One thing that I liked is the extensive use of randomization (returned peers are random, unchoking random peers) which has shown good results in practice.

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