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Analysis of user’s behavior and resource characteristics for private trackers

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Abstract

In recent years, a novel BitTorrent (BT) technology, Private Tracker (PT), has received extensive attention from both academia and industry. Due to its huge amount of traffic volumes and users, it is essential to understand PT’s characteristics regarding system management. In this paper, by studying the data crawled from a number of well-known PT sites, we performed an in-depth measurement and analysis of the PT system, in terms of resources and users’ behavior characteristics. The analysis of the activity and age distributions of torrents indicates that the sequence of torrent activities followed a power-law distribution while the sequence of torrent’s age followed a linear distribution. It was also found that the resources redundancy between any two PTs was larger than 60 %, which led to a substantial waste of storage space and power energy due to the lack of sharing mechanism among PT sites. Measurements on the users’ behavior show that every PT site had a number of users with stable levels who contributed to the survivability and popularity of the site. Finally, based on the results, several drawbacks of PT system were identified, which are crucial for efficacious system management.

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Acknowledgments

The research presented in this paper was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61221063, 61103240, 61103241, 91118005 and 91218301), the National Science & Technology Support Program of China (2011BAK08B02), the Application Foundation Research Program of SuZhou (SYG201227) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central University. The authors would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Qiang Li & Xiaohong Guan

  2. MoE Key Laboratory for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi’an Jiaotong University, P.O. Box 1088, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Tao Qin, Xiaohong Guan & Qinghua Zheng

  3. Tsinghua University, Room 3-621, FIT Building, Beijing, 100084, China

    Qiang Li

Authors
  1. Qiang Li
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  2. Tao Qin
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  3. Xiaohong Guan
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  4. Qinghua Zheng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qiang Li.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in IEEE ICC 2013 [30]. This version includes an extended measurement and analysis work on comparison between BT and PT and analysis of drawback in PT system.

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Li, Q., Qin, T., Guan, X. et al. Analysis of user’s behavior and resource characteristics for private trackers. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 8, 432–446 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-014-0266-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-014-0266-2

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