Abstract:

Due to the increasing popularity of P2P systems and their contribution to overall Internet traffic, it is essential to understand how content, which is the main attraction in P2P systems, is fed. The main goal of this talk is to identify and characterize those communities of users that are primarily responsible for publishing/feeding content in BitTorrent. For this purpose we have performed two large scale measurement studies that collectively identify the feeders of more than 30k torrents. Out of these measurements we conclude that a significant part of the BitTorrent’s content (40%) is fed by two different groups: (i) users concentrated min a few IP addresses of Hosting Service Providers. In particular, there is a single Hosting Provider in this community that alone is responsible of feeding 25% of the content published in the current major BitTorrent Portal. (ii) A large number of regular BitTorrent users spread across the networks of big ISPs. In addition, we characterize how the feeders of both communities behave, finding out that the typical Hosting Providers feeder (i) publishes a larger number of torrents that become more popular and (ii) seeds longer its torrents than regular users acting as feeders. Our findings suggest that a small group of users in Hosting Providers effectively leverage BitTorrent to publish content. Therefore, their presence is essential for the livelihood of BitTorrent.

The conference will be conducted in English