On the impact of uTP on BitTorrent completion time

BitTorrent, one of the most widespread file sharing P2P applications, recently introduced uTP, an application-level congestion control protocol which aims to efficiently use the available link capacity, while avoiding to interfere with the rest of user traffic (e.g., Web, VoIP and gaming) sharing the same access bottleneck. Research on uTP has so far focused on the investigation of the congestion control behavior on rather simple settings (i.e., single bottleneck, few backlogged flows, etc.), that are fairly far from the P2P settings in which the protocol is deployed. Moreover, prior work typically addressed questions, such as fairness and efficiency, that are natural from a congestion control context perspective, but are not directly related with the performance of the overall P2P system. In this work, we refine the understanding of uTP, by gauging its impact on the primary BitTorrent user-centric metric, namely the torrent download time, by means of packet level simulation. Results of our initial investigations show that: (i) in case uTP clients fully substitute TCP clients, no performance difference arise; (ii) in case of heterogeneous swarms, comprising peers using uTP and TCP congestion control, completion time of uTP peers can possibly benefit of lower uplink queuing delays, as signaling traffic (e.g., chunk requests) are not slowed down by long waits in the ADSL buffers.