Improving the network locality awareness for the BitTorrent content distribution network

Internet users consume a large volume of rich media, and the consumption is increasing dramatically with the pervasiveness of network. BitTorrent has been well accepted as a solution to large-scale content distribution without requiring major infrastructure investment. However, it has not taken into account the link optimization across networks, causing heavy traffic across networks. This limitation has been a major drawback for it being deployed in pervasive environments, where network resource is bounded, especially cross network linkages. Biased-BitTorrent is proposed to provide location-awareness to reduce cross-ISP traffic, but heavy load of cross-ISP traffic still exists. This work proposes two approaches, Biased-TFT and Biased-LRF to address the issue that remains in Biased-BitTorrent. Our result shows that the proposed approaches can restrict cross-ISP traffic to a low level while maintaining a high level of performance. This result suggests that, with certain improvement, it is feasible to confine the resource consumption of BitTorrent and make it possible to deploy in pervasive environments.