Unraveling the BitTorrent Ecosystem

BitTorrent is the most successful open Internet application for content distribution. Despite its importance, both in terms of its footprint in the Internet and the influence it has on emerging P2P applications, the BitTorrent Ecosystem is only partially understood. The authors seek to provide a nearly complete picture of the entire public BitTorrent Ecosystem. To this end, they crawl five of the most popular torrent-discovery sites over a nine-month period, identifying all of 4.6 million torrents and 38,996 trackers that the sites reference.