Managing inter-domain traffic in the presence of bittorrent file-sharing

Overlay routing operating in a selfish manner is known to cause undesired instability when it interacts with native layer routing. We observe similar selfish behavior with the BitTorrent protocol, where its performance-awareness causes it to constantly alter the routing decisions (peer and piece selection). This causes fluctuations in the load experienced by the underlying native network. By using real BitTorrent traces and a comprehensive simulation with different network characteristics, we show that BitTorrent systems easily disrupt the load balance across inter-domain links. Further, we find that existing native layer traffic management schemes suffer from several downsides and are not conducive to deployment. To resolve this dilemma, we propose two BitTorrent strategies that are effective in resolving the cross-layer conflict. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.2

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Srinivasan Seetharaman, Mostafa H. Ammar
• Keywords: Computer Systems Organization, Hardware, Native Layer, Real Bittorrent Traces, SIGMETRICS 2008