Resource demand and supply in BitTorrent content-sharing communities - 10 views
started by Paul Francis on 25 Mar 12
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This article looks at a few different BitTorrent communities and analyses them closely, looking at uploads and downloads in a supply and demand context. This is a good article because it shows how well BitTorrent users collaborate within the current system. It looks at resource contention, something which applies to about three-quarters of torrents and occurs when the demand for a torrent reaches a point where users downloads are slowed because the "supply" or uploads is too low and download speeds of leechers are limited as a result.
This article reveals interestingly that the long-tail applies in a similar way to BitTorrent as it does to more tangible examples of collaboration like Wikipedia. There are a small amount of uploaders who contribute a majority of resources. In one of the BitTorrent communities this was counterbalanced by the fact that the largest contributors were also the largest consumers. One of the three BitTorrent communities had most of its users contributing as well as downloading, whereas the other two had plenty of "free-riders".
This article acknowledges the power of BitTorrent and its overall effectiveness but also concludes that there could be improvements.
This article mentioned that the community resources allocation mechanism which is one of the good aspect for the encouragement of the collaboration within the networks. In either supply or demand users, they only need to contribute more within the system, they can improve the providing bandwidth. Furthermore, as the results from the article, there is the long tail of the peer join rates. It would regard to the torrent popularity that the peer join will drop fast over time. So that the content sharing within BitTorrent communities not just looked at the peer contribution, it should be focus on both, including the content quality and the popularity. All these factors would be affected BitTorrent community's collaboration and contribution.
It is a good resource for me to examine the relationship between peer to peer that work cooperating. If every user has good habits on contributing the content sharing and this kind of allocation mechanism may prevent or deduct 'free rider' as the download speeds would relate to the contribution. Lastly, the peer factor can drives content distribution on the Internet and the mechanisms that better serve humans
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