Exploring the use of BitTorrent in IPv4/IPv6 hybrid network environment

BitTorrent has generated a significant and continuously increasing portion of Internet traffic. Several designs have been recently proposed to reduce the BitTorrent traffic without sacrificing user downloading performance. However, Most of these designs only consider IPv4-only Internet, not thinking about IPv4/IPv6 hybrid network. With the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and the development of IPv6, the Internet is being converted from IPv4-only into IPv4/IPv6 hybrid. Thus, this paper examines a new approach to making BitTorrent system suitable to IPv4/IPv6 hybrid network, in which the dual-stack peers can share file via IPv4 or IPv6 connection. We present a simulation-based study in a special IPv4/IPv6 hybrid network topology based on CERNET and CERNET2. The simulation results show that our approach can effectively transfer BitTorrent traffic from IPv4 network to IPv6 network.