Performance analysis of BitTorrent protocol

BitTorrent protocol has been quite successful in capturing majority of Internet traffic since its inception due to its various mechanisms to improve the download performance of the network. The mechanisms like tit-for-tat, optimistic unchoking, anti-snubbing and various piece selection strategy, etc. have been working very well. This work is an attempt to study the performance of BitTorrent protocol and its networking infrastructure through two strategies, namely, (A) Simulations based using BitTorrent patch in ns-2 simulator and (B) Real networks using client implementation based on libtorrent library. Empirical results thus obtained are used to infer various performance parameters of BitTorrent protocols.