BitTorrent is a mechanism for file sharing that allows clients to download a file by sharing pieces of a file with each other. In that way, when the demand for a file is high, scalability is not an issue due to BitTorrent's independence from servers. BitTorrent has been popular among users since its invention due to its ability to provide them with important files, and as such it comprises a significant portion of Internet traffic.
BitTorrent over the Internet is an extremely complex system, and people have tried to understand its performance for several reasons. First, its quality of service to users is important in that they want to get a file in a reasonable amount of time, preferably without having to upload too much of the file. BitTorrent's performance varies for clients depending on network conditions. It causes the initial seeder to upload a large amount of the file, which may deter people from being the initial seeder. Also, clients can be engineered that download a file without having to contribute by uploading. For these reasons, people have tried to improve it.
ISPs have been concerned about BitTorrent's bandwidth consumption. Because a BitTorrent client typically uses 4 TCP connections, it tends to hog bandwidth from other connections. As a result, ISPs have throttled BitTorrent traffic. Work has been done to improve spatial locality by matching peers to other peers within the same ISP. This has greatly improved download speed for users, and been beneficial to ISPs in not requiring them to relay external BitTorrent traffic.
The more BitTorrent is improved to be reliable, the more likely it will be used for things in addition to file sharing. For example, research has been made on how to use BitTorrent for video streaming. Since video streaming is not tolerant to delay and jitter, improvements to BitTorrent can be valuable. It makes me wonder what BitTorrent will be used for as it becomes more and more reliable.
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