TY - GEN
T1 - Unraveling Bittorrent's file unavailability
T2 - 2010 IEEE 10th International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, P2P 2010
AU - Kaune, Sebastian
AU - Rumín, Rubén Cuevas
AU - Tyson, Gareth
AU - Mauthe, Andreas
AU - Guerrero, Carmen
AU - Steinmetz, Ralf
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - BitTorrent suffers from one fundamental problem: the long-term availability of content. This occurs on a massive-scale with 38% of torrents becoming unavailable within the first month. In this paper we explore this problem by performing two large-scale measurement studies including 46K torrents and 29M users. The studies go significantly beyond any previous work by combining per-node, per-torrent and system-wide observations to ascertain the causes, characteristics and repercussions of file unavailability. The study confirms the conclusion from previous works that seeders have a significant impact on both performance and availability. However, we also present some crucial new findings: (i) the presence of seeders is not the sole factor involved in file availability, (ii) 23.5% of nodes that operate in seedless torrents can finish their downloads, and (iii) BitTorrent availability is discontinuous, operating in cycles of temporary unavailability.
AB - BitTorrent suffers from one fundamental problem: the long-term availability of content. This occurs on a massive-scale with 38% of torrents becoming unavailable within the first month. In this paper we explore this problem by performing two large-scale measurement studies including 46K torrents and 29M users. The studies go significantly beyond any previous work by combining per-node, per-torrent and system-wide observations to ascertain the causes, characteristics and repercussions of file unavailability. The study confirms the conclusion from previous works that seeders have a significant impact on both performance and availability. However, we also present some crucial new findings: (i) the presence of seeders is not the sole factor involved in file availability, (ii) 23.5% of nodes that operate in seedless torrents can finish their downloads, and (iii) BitTorrent availability is discontinuous, operating in cycles of temporary unavailability.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78349253082&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/P2P.2010.5569991
DO - 10.1109/P2P.2010.5569991
M3 - Conference Paper published in a book
AN - SCOPUS:78349253082
SN - 9781424471416
T3 - 2010 IEEE 10th International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, P2P 2010 - Proceedings
BT - 2010 IEEE 10th International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, P2P 2010 - Proceedings
Y2 - 25 August 2010 through 27 August 2010
ER -