Adapting BitTorrent to Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

BitTorrent is one of the Internet's most efficient content distribution protocols. It is known to perform very well over the wired Internet where end-to-end performance is almost guaranteed. However, in wireless ad hoc networks, many constraints appear as the scarcity of resources and their shared nature, which make running BitTorrent with its default configuration not lead to best performances. To these constraints it adds the fact that peers are both routers and end-users and that TCP-performance drops seriously with the number of hops. The authors show in this work that the neighbor selection mechanism in BitTorrent plays an important role in determining the performance of the protocol when deployed over a wireless ad hoc network.