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Bundling practice in BitTorrent: what, how, and why

Published: 11 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We conduct comprehensive measurements on the current practice of content bundling to understand the structural patterns of torrents and the participant behaviors of swarms on one of the largest BitTorrent portals: The Pirate Bay. From the datasets of the 120K torrents and 14.8M peers, we investigate what constitutes torrents and how users participate in swarms from the perspective of bundling, across different content categories: Movie, TV, Porn, Music, Application, Game and E-book. In particular, we focus on: (1) how prevalent content bundling is, (2) how and what files are bundled into torrents, (3) what motivates publishers to bundle files, and (4) how peers access the bundled files. We find that over 72% of BitTorrent torrents contain multiple files, which indicates that bundling is widely used for file sharing. We reveal that profit-driven BitTorrent publishers who promote their own web sites for financial gains like advertising tend to prefer to use the bundling. We also observe that most files (94%) in a bundle torrent are selected by users and the bundle torrents are more popular than the single (or non-bundle) ones on average. Overall, there are notable differences in the structural patterns of torrents and swarm characteristics (i) across different content categories and (ii) between single and bundle torrents.

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  • (2016)Improving the QoE in Personal Clouds with Cross-Swarm Bundling2016 IEEE 41st Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN.2016.71(424-432)Online publication date: Nov-2016
  • (2016)Background and OverviewContent Distribution for Mobile Internet: A Cloud-based Approach10.1007/978-981-10-1463-5_1(3-15)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2016
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMETRICS '12: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE joint international conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
June 2012
450 pages
ISBN:9781450310970
DOI:10.1145/2254756
  • cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
    ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review  Volume 40, Issue 1
    Performance evaluation review
    June 2012
    433 pages
    ISSN:0163-5999
    DOI:10.1145/2318857
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 June 2012

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Author Tags

  1. BitTorrent
  2. content bundling
  3. peer-to-peer

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Virtual resource pricing scheme in cloud platformsInternational Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations10.1504/IJNVO.2018.09067618:1(67-79)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
  • (2016)Improving the QoE in Personal Clouds with Cross-Swarm Bundling2016 IEEE 41st Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN.2016.71(424-432)Online publication date: Nov-2016
  • (2016)Background and OverviewContent Distribution for Mobile Internet: A Cloud-based Approach10.1007/978-981-10-1463-5_1(3-15)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2016
  • (2015)ISP-friendly peer-assisted on-demand streaming of long duration content in BBC iPlayer2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)10.1109/INFOCOM.2015.7218393(289-297)Online publication date: Apr-2015
  • (2015)Scalable and efficient file sharing in information-centric networkingJournal of Network and Computer Applications10.1016/j.jnca.2015.07.01057:C(21-32)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2015
  • (2014)PPPProceedings of The Ninth International Conference on Future Internet Technologies10.1145/2619287.2619296(1-6)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2014
  • (2014)Strategic bundling for content availability and fast distribution in BitTorrentComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2014.01.01343(64-73)Online publication date: May-2014
  • (2014)Peeking through the BitTorrent Seedbox Hosting EcosystemTraffic Monitoring and Analysis10.1007/978-3-642-54999-1_10(115-126)Online publication date: 2014
  • (2013)Content availability and bundling in swarming systemsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2012.221220521:2(580-593)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2013
  • (2013)On the interplay between content popularity and performance in p2p systemsProceedings of the 10th international conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems10.1007/978-3-642-40196-1_2(3-21)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2013
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