Torrent Crawler: a tool for collecting information from BitTorrent networks

BitTorrent is a free peer-to-peer (P2P) content-sharing application with a complex and dynamic overlay structure due to loose coupling, high churn rate, and varying responsiveness of nodes. The complexity and the dynamic nature of the overlay structure can mask the problems in the network, making errors difficult to detect and diagnosis in a timely manner. Furthermore, the heavy reliance of clients on the node local views compounds the problems such as partitioning in the network or load imbalance due to biased peer selection. In an effort to provide the network with partial global information to resolve the network problems, this project looks into introducing a tool that efficiently collects global information from BitTorrent network. The tool, called Torrent Crawler (TC) uses a number of techniques to efficiently find all participating peers of the swarm, collecting global information from the network. The crawler also collects the information unobtrusively to the network traffic. In this paper, we describe the design, the implementation, and the evaluation of TC.