taming the Torrent

[email protected] o v e r t h e pa S t d e c a d e , t h e p e e r -t o peer (P2P) model for building distributed systems has enjoyed incredible success and popularity, forming the basis for a wide variety of important Internet applications such as file sharing, voice-over-IP (VoIP), and video streaming. This success has not been universally welcomed. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and P2P systems, for example, have developed a complicated relationship that has been the focus of much media attention. While P2P bandwidth demands have yielded significant revenues for ISPs as users upgrade to broadband for improved P2P performance, P2P systems are one of their greatest and costliest traffic engineering challenges, because peers establish connections largely independent of the Internet routing. Ono [4] is an extension to a popular BitTorrent client that biases P2P connections to avoid much of these costs without sacrificing, and potentially improving, BitTorrent performance.