Subject: [p2prg] Can Realistic BitTorrent Experiments Be Performed on Clusters?

From: Ashwin Rao <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:46:53 +0200

Hello,

We were among the first one to run large scale BitTorrent experiments
on clusters instead of classical platforms like PlanetLab. Our
argument in favor of a cluster is the scale (we ran up to 10 000
simultaneous real BitTorrent peers, but is is possible to run much
more) and the reproducibility.

However, we received criticism arguing that PlanetLab experiments are
more realistic. PlanetLab offers a large variety of delays and loss
rates but due to virtualization it fails to be realistic.

For this reason, we performed a study to evaluate the impact of delays
and losses on BitTorrent experiments. We found that realistic
BitTorrent experiments can be safely run on clusters. We believe that
this work is relevant for this community. Here is the reference to
this work that has been accepted in the P2P'10 conference:
http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00494410/en/

Regards,
Ashwin