Exploiting scheduling and free-riding for offline downloading in BitTorrent networks

SUMMARY Recently, the peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture has become a popular scheme for Internet users to rapidly exchange files. As reported in previous studies, P2P traffic accounts for a significant portion of overall Internet traffic. Many computing resources, for example, network bandwidth and disk space, may be consumed by P2P clients. Accordingly, in this paper, we devise a novel scheme that integrates advantageous features of both the conventional client–server and the P2P architectures to create an offline downloading service. Specifically, the proposed service acts as an agent that downloads required files from the BitTorrent network without consuming local computing resources. In other words, users can stay offline during the download process. Because the proposed scheme aims to provide service to numerous users at the same time, a proper scheduling technique is adopted to achieve better download performance. Moreover, a free-riding mechanism is seamlessly incorporated with the proposed priority queuing to facilitate more effective bandwidth utilization. Empirical studies show that our scheme is promising in practical applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.