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Observing the BitTorrent universe through Telescopes

Recent analysis of the latest peer-to-peer trends worldwide indicates that BitTorrent is the most popular file sharing protocol, taking more than half of the P2P traffic in some geographical locations. Despite several studies about the dynamics of the “BitTorrent universe”, there exists no methodology to systematically observe it. This is mainly due to the challenges that need to be faced in order to observe the BitTorrent universe, the specificity of existing studies, and the ad hoc nature of the monitoring methods employed so far. In this paper, we propose a novel monitoring architecture (called TorrentU) that allows the systematic observation of large numbers of BitTorrent networks. Complementary monitoring strategies are flexibly combined to allow varying degrees of network/geographic coverage, information accuracy and richness of detail. To show the concept and technical feasibility of TorrentU, we implemented a prototype with the key parts of the architecture, and evaluated it through a case study with a rich set of monitoring campaigns running on PlanetLab nodes.