BTLab: A System-Centric, Data-Driven Analysis and Measurement Platform for BitTorrent Clients

The authors present BTLab, a distributed platform to measure and analyze the differences between BitTorrent clients. Due to extensibility, and certain vagueness in the BitTorrent specification, many clients diverge in some aspects from each other. Most research to date disregarded the effects of these differences. BTLab allows them to create and control BitTorrent swarms, composed of hundreds of clients of their choice. They use captured network traffic to measure the performance and uncover the reasons for observed differences. For their experiments, they deployed BTLab on a cluster and on Planetlab and selected four popular BitTorrent clients.