Design Issues of the prTorrent File Sharing Protocol

The absence of piece rarity in the BitTorrent Unchoking Algorithm exposes it to various exploitations and hinders optimized performances. prTorrent is a file sharing protocol based on BitTorrent which considers rarity of pieces swapped during unchoking for optimized performance within the swarm. This paper discusses the philosophies, issues and structure behind development of the prTorrent p2p protocol from scratch. The protocol was developed in Java to promote portability in simulation as well as emulation. We hope this work is a guide to students and developers planning to build a p2p simulator from the very base and alleviate design differences between simulation and emulation.