Big torrent measurement: A country-, network-, and content-centric analysis of video sharing in BitTorrent

BitTorrent (BT) is still widely used for, mostly, illegal file sharing despite the emergence of legal streaming services. Besides piracy BT traffic can be a challenge for networks and their management due to flash crowds. Measurements provide data to understand regional and temporal traffic patterns sup­porting network management. This work presents a large data set comprising three months of BT measurements from 2016, comprising more than 70,000 swarms and 6,600 samples. To identify the regions, Autonomous Systems (AS), and content responsible for the most traffic the raw measurement data is transformed and aggregated into graphs centered around countries, ASes, and videos. By calculating node-centric graph metrics the important actors in those graphs are identified and the changes over time are investigated. The results show that English-speaking countries are most important for the distribution of video files and that most traffic results from Philippine ASes and one Dutch AS belonging to a server hosting company. Furthermore, strong weekly patterns are observed which are effected by the release of popular content causing weekly flash crowds. The measurements presented herein raise doubt that anti-piracy measures are effective, showing that the piracy problem needs to be addressed on a global level since users can easily circumvent local measures taken. For network operators those results mean that traffic can be expected as soon as new popular content is released and that the destinations and source will change in the long term.