Leveraging Social Networks for Increased BitTorrent Robustness

In peer-to-peer content delivery systems, such as BitTorrent, there may exist nodes that are non-cooperative and do not contribute their upload bandwidth to the system while still downloading content from others. The current widely used countermeasures against this freeriding behavior have been shown to be ineffective. In this paper, the authors address the problem by leveraging the trust latent in the social networks and explicitly incorporating the social links as part of the BitTorrent content distribution infrastructure. The extensive system evaluation produces several insights. First, the social network topology alone without the trackers is an efficient and scalable content distribution medium. Second, thanks to the cooperative social links, BitTorrent's robustness to freeriding significantly improves.