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A multi-faced measurement study on a large private BitTorrent community

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Abstract

Private BitTorrent community is becoming increasingly popular, and generates a huge amount of Internet traffic. In this paper, we present a thorough measurement study on a famous private BitTorrent community, CHDBits. We find that the content of torrents published in this community are highly available, although many torrents may have been released for a very long time, and we also obtain that users in most torrents could download at a high rate. By studying user profiles, we show that many users have participated in multiple torrents, thereby generating a great amount of upload and download traffic. The user profiles also reveal that almost all users maintain a high share ratio, and are willing to contribute to content distribution by spending more time in seeding than in leeching (downloading). Our study suggests that the bandwidths of a user have a significant impact on their behavior. Low bandwidth users are more likely to participate in the torrents with a smaller content size or a higher popularity; compared with low bandwidth users, high bandwidth users tend to participate in more torrents, but spend much less time in seeding.

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Notes

  1. We may sometimes use “community” or “private community” to refer to “private BitTorrent community” for the ease of expression, if without ambiguity.

  2. If no ambiguity raises, the term “user” will be used when we refer to the “register user” for the simplicity of expression.

  3. As each peer periodically notifies the CHDBits tracker of its current download progress, CHDBits can leverage this information to identify the type of each peer.

  4. If not otherwise stated, the data in the snapshot of CHDBits collected on 2011/09/03 will be used in the figures presenting the status of CHDBits at a specific time. The selection of snapshot time exerts little impact on system status, since CHDBits has run for a long time.

  5. During the ten-day period, 08/28, 09/03, and 09/04 are weekend.

  6. Recall that the total traffic generated by CHDBits users was a little less than 100 PB on 2011/09/03, as shown in Fig. 1.

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  1. Department of Electronic & Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, People’s Republic China

    Qing-Chao Cai & Kwok-Tung Lo

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  1. Qing-Chao Cai
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  2. Kwok-Tung Lo
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Correspondence to Kwok-Tung Lo.

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Cai, QC., Lo, KT. A multi-faced measurement study on a large private BitTorrent community. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 8, 32–48 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-013-0207-5

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