Dasu - ISP Characterization from the Edge: A BitTorrent Implementation

Evaluating and characterizing access ISPs is critical to consumers shopping for alternative services and governments surveying the availability of broadband services to their citizens. The authors present Dasu, a service for crowdsourcing ISP characterization to the edge of the network. Dasu is implemented as an extension to a popular BitTorrent client and has been available since July 2010. While the prototype uses BitTorrent as its host application, its design is agnostic to the particular host application. The paper showcases their current implementation using both a prerecorded execution trace and a live run.