On Blind Mice and the Elephant -- Understanding the Network Impact of a Large Distributed System

News

  • 11/29/2011: AS topology made available.

Motivation and approach

A thorough understanding of the network impact of emerging large-scale distributed systems -- where traffic flows and what it costs -- must encompass users' behavior, the traffic they generate and the topology over which that traffic flows. In the case of BitTorrent, however, previous studies have been limited by narrow perspectives that restrict such analysis.

This work studies a comprehensive view of BitTorrent, using data from a representative set of 500,000 users sampled over a two year period, located in 169 countries and 3,150 networks.

We use public BGP data and the AS-level paths seen in traceroutes between BitTorrent users to infer the relationships between ASes, following the approach in our "Sidewalk Ends" work. This dataset, generated from data collected between March and May 2010, is available at the bottom of this page.

People

Faculty

Grad students and postdocs

External collaborators

  • Georgos Siganos, Telefonica Research

Publications

Resources

  • AS links dataset:

    We ask that you create an account on our website to access the data. Once you have created an account and logged in, a download link will appear at the bottom of this page. Any paper that uses this dataset must refer to the publication above and you must send us a copy of the paper upon publication.

    This data is part of the EdgeScope project, which provides researchers with access to network measurements collected from hundreds of thousands of end users.

  • Public view data