Abstract
Since December 2008, the official BitTorrent client is using a new congestion-control protocol for data transfer, implemented at the application layer and built over UDP at the transport-layer: this new protocol undergoes the name of LEDBAT, for Low Extra Delay Background Transport.
In this paper, we study different flavors of the LEDBAT protocol, corresponding to different milestones in the BitTorrent software evolution, by means of an active testbed. Focusing on single flow scenario, we investigate emulated artificial network conditions, such as additional delay and capacity limitation. Then, in order to better grasp the potential impact of LEDBAT on the current Internet traffic, we consider a multiple flows scenario, and investigate the performance of a mixture of TCP and LEDBAT flows, so to better assess what “lower-than best effort” means in practice. Our results show that LEDBAT has already fulfilled some of its original design goals, though some issues still need to be addressed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Morris, S.: μTorrent release 1.9 alpha 13485 (December 2008), http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=379206#p379206
Bennett, R.: The next Internet meltdown (December 2008), http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/01/richard_bennett_utorrent_udp
Shalunov, S., Klinker, E.: Users want P2P, we make it work. In: IETF P2P Infrastructure Workshop (May 2008)
BitTorrent Calls UDP Report ”Utter Nonsense”. (December 2008), http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/01/2331257
Shalunov, S.: Low extra delay background transport (LEDBAT). IETF Draft (March 2009)
Rossi, D., Testa, C., Valenti, S., Veglia, P., Muscariello, L.: News from the internet congestion control world. Technical Report (August 2009)
MS Windows Developer Center: Tcp receive window size and window scaling, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms819736.aspx
Qiu, D., Srikant, R.: Modeling and performance analysis of BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks. In: ACM SIGCOMM 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA (August 2004)
Bharambe, A.R., Herley, C., Padmanabhan, V.N.: Analyzing and Improving a BitTorrent Networks Performance Mechanisms. In: IEEE INFOCOM 2006, Barcelona, Spain (April 2006)
Bindal, R., Cao, P., Chan, W., Medved, J., Suwala, G., Bates, T., Zhang, A.: Improving Traffic Locality in BitTorrent via Biased Neighbor Selection. In: IEEE ICDCS 2006, Lisboa, Portugal (July 2006)
Izal, M., Urvoy-Keller, G., Biersack, E.W., Felber, P., Al Hamra, A., Garcés-Erice, L.: Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent’s Lifetime. In: Barakat, C., Pratt, I. (eds.) PAM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3015, pp. 1–11. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Bonfiglio, D., Mellia, M., Meo, M., Rossi, D.: Detailed Analysis of Skype Traffic. IEEE Transaction on Multimedia 11(1) (January 2009)
De Cicco, L., Mascolo, S., Palmisano, V.: Skype video responsiveness to bandwidth variations. In: ACM NOSSDAV 2008, Braunschweig, Germany (May 2008)
Alessandria, E., Gallo, M., Leonardi, E., Mellia, M., Meo, M.: P2P-TV Systems under Adverse Network Conditions: A Measurement Study. In: IEEE INFOCOM 2009 (April 2009)
Padhye, J., Firoiu, V., Towsley, D., Kurose, J.: Modeling TCP throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation. ACM SIGCOMM Comp. Comm. Rev. 24(4) (October 1998)
Brakmo, L., O’Malley, S., Peterson, L.: TCP Vegas: New techniques for congestion detection and avoidance. In: ACM SIGCOMM 1994, London, UK (August 1994)
Venkataramani, A., Kokku, R., Dahlin, M.: TCP Nice: a mechanism for background transfers. In: USENIX OSDI 2002, Boston, MA, US (December 2002)
Kuzmanovic, A., Knightly, E.: TCP-LP: low-priority service via end-point congestion control. IEEE/ACM Transaction on Networking 14(4) (August 2006)
Liu, S., Vojnovic, M., Gunawardena, D.: Competitive and Considerate Congestion Control for Bulk Data Transfers. In: IWQoS 2007, Evaston, IL, US (June 2007)
Key, P., Massoulié, L., Wang, B.: Emulating low-priority transport at the application layer: a background transfer service. In: ACM SIGMETRICS 2004, New York, NY, USA (January 2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rossi, D., Testa, C., Valenti, S. (2010). Yes, We LEDBAT: Playing with the New BitTorrent Congestion Control Algorithm. In: Krishnamurthy, A., Plattner, B. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6032. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12334-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12334-4_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12333-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12334-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)