Information

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LEDBAT+BitTorrent Dataset

In (about) 2010, BitTorrent announced that he would drop TCP in favor of a new experimental congestion control protocol, initially closed source and nicknamed uTP and later standardized at the IETF under the name of LEDBAT. In this project, we study the impact that LEDBAT has on BitTorrent performance with an experimental approach. From a more abstract and fundamental viewpoint, we study the interplay of data plane throughput vs control plane delay. We started with a simulative approach in [P2P-11], then continued with an experimental approach in [TMA-12] and [P2P-13a], gathering datesets that we release in this page.

Aim

In particular project, we address the trade-off between the data plane efficiency and the control plane timeliness for the BitTorrent performance. We argue that loss-based congestion control protocols can fill large buffers, leading to a higher end-to-end delay, unlike low-priority or delay-based congestion control protocols. We perform experiments for both the uTorrent and mainline BitTorrent clients, and we study the impact of uTP (a novel transport protocol proposed by BitTorrent) and several TCP congestion control algorithms (Cubic, New Reno, LP, Vegas and Nice) on the download completion time.

Findings

Briefly, in case peers in the swarm all use the same congestion control algorithm, we observe that the specific algorithm has only a limited impact on the swarm performance. Conversely, when a mix of TCP congestion control algorithms coexists, peers employing a delay-based low-priority algorithm exhibit shorter completion time. To promote further analysis and cross-comparison, we additionally make all our dataset available to the research community.

Dataset

Dataset includes application-level logs, kernel-level queue log and traffic volume statistics gathered in multiple tests executed on the Grid5000 testbed.

Specifically, for each test we varied the TCP congestion control flavor, or used the BitTorrent version using the uTP congestion control protocol.


References