Understanding the Topologies of BitTorrent Networks: A Measurement View

BitTorrent (BT) is one of the most popular Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network applications. Most characteristics (except the topology) of BT network have been examined extensively by measurement approaches. In this paper, the authors deploy a measurement system to study the performance-related properties of BT topologies. They also use their measurement system to verify some previous simulation and experiment results obtained by other researchers. Different from previous results, they observe that a BT swarm has short distance, low clustering coefficient and Gaussian-like degree-frequency distribution. This indicates that a BT swarm is very close to a random network rather than a scale-free network or a small world.