The Distance-Availability Weighted Piece Selection Method for BitTorrent: A BitTorrent Piece Selection Method for On-demand Streaming

During the last few years, BitTorrent has become a popular way of transferring large files over the Internet. However, the original out-of-order nature of the BitTorrent protocol has made it difficult to enable playback of media files which have not yet been fully transferred. In this paper we propose a new BitTorrent piece selection method to enable simultaneous playback of the transferred media file without impacting on the speed and quality of the transfer. Unlike the original rarest-first piece selection method, the distance-availability weighted method compromises between selecting rare pieces and pieces which are soon to be played back, making playback possible before the transfer is complete.