Researchers develop rules to improve BitTorrent download speeds

Emil

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Researchers at Delft University of Technology are proposing a new set of rules that significantly improve BitTorrent download speeds. The Tribler project has put together a new Superior Seeding Standard, inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies at private tracker communities.

Details of the new initiative are outlined in a paper titled "Fast Download but Eternal Seeding: The Reward and Punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement." It will be presented at the P2P 2011 conference later this year, but it's also embedded below for your reading pleasure (via TorrentFreak).

The Tribler BitTorrent client has been in development for research purposes for more than five years. In December 2010, Tribler became the first BitTorrent client to offer truly decentralized P2P. Now, the latest release of the client, Tribler 5.38, implements the Superior Seeding Standard rules, a set of rules that reward users who put the most effort into sharing.

"One of the problems with tit-for-tat is that it provides no motivation for seeding the terabytes of long-tail content that's out there on BitTorrent," Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. "We believe that people should be rewarded with priority downloads when they are seeding these more obscure files, especially the stuff which only gets a few downloads a month. The 'seeding rewards' concept has been in the making for several years. It always required a central server, but we finally made it work in a truly decentralized manner with robustness against cheating. We implemented a first version of this proposed 'Superior Seeding Standard' in the latest Tribler release, and we expect that it will be tweaked and optimized quite a bit in the years to come."

After analyzing the effectiveness of private BitTorrent trackers, the researchers found that users achieve great speeds, but the ratio requirements discriminate against users who don't have high-bandwidth connections. Their proposed rules reward BitTorrent users independent of their connection limitations. Instead of looking at the share ratio alone, the algorithm looks at your "seeding effort" to determine your priority in the swarm, which results in faster downloads.

As is with most of Tribler's innovations, however, getting other BitTorrent clients to adopt this set of rules will prove to be a tricky endeavor. If the official BitTorrent client and µTorrent were to implement the Superior Seeding Standard, the BitTorrent world would immediately start to benefit.

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spell-check:
"If the official BitTorrent client and µTorrent wer to implement the Superior Seeding Standard, the BitTorrent world would immediately start to benefit."

"were" word is incorrectly spelled as "wer"...

on topic, nice feature of tribler = independent of internet connection limitation...

bad feature = 33.7mb installer size?

come on, utorrent 3.0 is only ~600kb...
 
IMO the title should be: Don't read me, I'm stating something silly.
..because you can't download faster than your isp allows you too. This tribler client will actually discriminate bad seeders(hit&runners, etc) and provide them with slow peers and will reward good seeders with the maximum possible. Why in the world would anyone want to download slower. I'd choose uT/vuze anyday. This tribler will never fly, not with anyone with at least a working neuron it won't.
 
@ sMILEY4ever
you're missing the point. this means that when bandwidth is limited, seeders will get maximum speed while leechers will get slower speeds.
with the current setup, both seeders and leechers get an average speed. this new system is far superior to the current one.
 
Mindwraith said:
@ sMILEY4ever
you're missing the point. this means that when bandwidth is limited, seeders will get maximum speed while leechers will get slower speeds.
with the current setup, both seeders and leechers get an average speed. this new system is far superior to the current one.
Damn, guess i cant be greedy and leech :(
 
@ Mindwraith
i believe you always get maximum speed on well-seeded torrents, but if the torrents have low seeds a good seeder gets priority over others because he is more likely to re-seed the torrent.
 
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