SEMINAR ON

BitTorrent
A P2P file distribution system
PRESENTED BY
BRAJA GOPAL PATRA
M.TECH COMPUTER SC. & ENGG.
NIT,AGARTALA
 Index
• Why do we need BitTorrent?
• History of BitTorrent.
• What is limewire?
• What’s it?
• How does it work?
• What is DHT?
• Technologies built on BitTorrent
• Screen shots of BitTorrent Software.
• Limitations
• Conclusion
 Why do we need
BitTorrent?
• Traditional Client/Server Sharing
- Performance deteriorates rapidly as the number
of clients increases.
• Free-riding in P2P network
– Free riders only download without contributing to
the network.
 BitTorrent
• Scalability of BitTorrent is very good.
Even more peers means better
performance.
• Strong incentives to prevent free-
riding.
 History of BitTorrent
• Programmer Bram Cohen designed the
protocol in April 2001 and released a first
implementation on 2001-07-02.
• It is now maintained by Cohen's company
BitTorrent, Inc..
• According to isoHunt, the total amount of
shared content was more than 9.4
petabytes as of 2009-09-10.
 What is limewire?
• In LimeWire versions before 5.0, users
could accidentally configure the software
to allow access to any file on their
computer, including documents with
personal information,but Recent versions
of LimeWire do not allow unintentional
sharing.
• One investigation showed that of 123
randomly selected downloaded files, 37
contained malware – about 30%.In mid
2008, a Macintosh trojan exploiting a
vulnerability involving Apple Remote
Desktop was distributed via LimeWire
affecting users of Mac OS.
 What’s it?
• BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing
protocol used for distributing large
amounts of data without putting the level
of strain on their computers that would
be needed for standard Internet
hosting.
• A BitTorrent client is any program that
implements the BitTorrent protocol.
• Each client is capable of requesting, and
transmitting any type of computer file
over a network, using the protocol.
• A peer is any computer running an instance
of a client.
 How does it work?

• To share a file or group of files, a peer

first creates a small file called a
"torrent“(e.g. Abc.torrent). & this .torrent
file contains necessary information :
• Name
• Size
• Checksum
• Tracker
• Peers that want to download the file must first obtain a
torrent file for it, and connect to the specified
tracker, which tells them from which other peers to
download the pieces of the file. Though both ultimately
transfer files over a network, a BitTorrent download
differs from a classic download (as is typical with an
HTTP or FTP request, for example) in several
fundamental ways:
 (i) BitTorrent makes many small data (The
peer distributing a data file treats the file
as a number of identically sized pieces,
typically between 64 KB and 4 MB each)
requests over different TCP connections to
different machines, while classic
downloading is typically made via a single
TCP connection to a single machine.
(ii) BitTorrent downloads in a random or in a
"rarest-first“ approach that ensures high
availability, while classic downloads are
sequential.
 Dynamic Hash Table
• DHT is the main function behind the a peer-
to-peer file sharing protocol and is a class
of decentralized distributed systems that
provide a lookup service.
• (Key, value) pairs are stored in the DHT, and
any participating node can efficiently
retrieve the value associated with a given
key.
• Responsibility for maintaining the
mapping from keys to values is
distributed among the nodes, in such a
way that a change in the set of
participants causes a minimal amount of
disruption.
•This allows DHTs to scale to extremely
large numbers of nodes and to handle
continual node arrivals, departures, and
failures.
In this animation, the coloured bars beneath all of the 7 clients in the upper
region above represent individual pieces of the file. After the initial pieces
transfer from the seed , the pieces are individually transferred from client to
client. The original seeder only needs to send out one copy of the file for all
the clients to receive a copy.
 Technologies built on
BitTorrent
• Web seeding
• MultiTracker
• Decentralized Keyword Searching
 Information of a downloading
file
General information Tracker information
Information of peers Information of pieces
Information of file Graph of downloading &
uploading speed
 Limitations
• Content unavailability
• Lack of anonymity
• Speed
• The leech problem
 Conclusion
• BitTorrent is a well thought-out
protocol that embraces aspects of
cooperation and self-optimizing
mechanisms.
• BitTorrent propose solutions for
current optimization and scalability
problems.
 References
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(p
rotocol)
• http://www.bittorrent.com
• http://www.seminarsonly.com
• http://www.bittorrent.org/protocol.html
• http://torrentfreak.com/
Interactions
Thank
you