Strategies of Conflict in Coexisting Streaming Overlays

This paper presents a performance study of BitTorrent-like P2P systems by modeling, based on extensive measurements and trace analysis. Existing studies on BitTorrent systems are single-torrent based and usually assume the process of request arrivals to a torrent is Poisson-like. However, in reality, most BitTorrent peers participate in multiple torrents and file popularity changes over time. The study of representative BitTorrent traffic provides insights into the evolution of single-torrent systems and several new findings regarding the limitations of BitTorrent systems: Due to the exponentially decreasing peer arrival rate in a torrent, the service availability of the corresponding file becomes poor quickly, and eventually it is hard to locate and download this file.