What is BUtorrent?

"BUtorrent" (Boston University Torrent) is a file sharing client obtained modifying the scheduling of the seed in the BitTorrent protocol.

In a content distribution (file sharing) scenario, the initial phase is delicate due to the lack of global knowledge and the dynamics of the overlay. An unwise piece dissemination in this phase can cause delays in reaching steady state, thus increasing file download times. After showing that finding the scheduling strategy for optimal dissemination is computationally hard, even when the offline knowledge of the overlay is given, we devise a new class of scheduling algorithms at the seed (source peer with full content), based on a proportional fair approach, and we implement them on a real file sharing client. In addition to simulation results, we validated on our own file sharing client (BUTorrent) that our solution improves up to 25% the average downloading time of a standard file sharing protocol. Moreover, we give theoretical upper bounds on the improvements that our scheduling strategies may achieve.

Publications

- Flavio Esposito, Ibrahim Matta, Bera Debajyoti and Pietro Michiardi.
"On the Impact of Seed Scheduling in Peer-to-Peer Networks."
In Journal of Computer Networks, July 2011. [PDF]

- Flavio Esposito, Ibrahim Matta, Pietro Michiardi, Nobuyuki Mitsutake and Damiano Carra.
"Seed Scheduling for Peer-to-Peer Networks".
The 8th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA 2009).
Boston, MA 9 - 11 July 2009. [PDF] [PS] [Slides]

- Flavio Esposito, Ibrahim Matta, Pietro Michiardi, Nobuyuki Mitsutake and Damiano Carra
"Seed Scheduling for Peer-to-Peer Networks". Technical Report BUCS-TR-2009-011. March 26, 2009. [pdf] [ps]

Client

- Download the client in a [Zip] or [Tar.gz] format (last update: March 8th, 2010).

or get it with our github repository: https://github.com/flavioesposito/BUTorrent.git

People

Flavio Esposito
Ibrahim Matta,
Pietro Michiardi,
Nobuyuki Mitsutake,
Damiano Carra
Debajyoti Bera