________________________________________ From: Umar Saif [umar@lums.edu.pk] Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2011 6:22 AM To: Umar Saif Subject: BitTorrent for the Developing-world Dear Friends - Have you noticed that BitTorrent has disproportionately poor performance over low-bandwidth connections in countries like Pakistan? BitTorrent is a hugely popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, accounting for as much as 70% of the Internet traffic in countries with widespread broadband connections. In a country like Pakistan, where Internet connections typically vary between 5-20 KB/sec, BitTorrent is almost unusable. Over the past one and half year, we studied the performance and behavior of BitTorrent in the developing-world using hundreds of real-world and synthetic swarms. We found that under low-bandwidth conditions, BitTorrent's performance and fairness significantly deteriorates. Therefore, my research group has developed a modified BitTorrent client for the developing-world. Our client, called BitMate, enhances the performance of low-bandwidth nodes without cheating, circumventing the fairness policy of BitTorrent or adversely affecting the performance of other peers. BitMate outperforms vanilla BitTorrent by close to 70% in download performance, while at the same time improving upload contribution by as much as 1000%! BitMate is fully compliant with the BitTorrent protocol and compatible with existing BitTorrent clients. BitMate is implemented using Azureus (Vuze) code base. Please use our client, let us know what you think and help spread the word. More at: http://www.dritte.org/bitmate.html P.S. The current client is our first public release. Please let us know if you face any issues in installing or using the client. Best regards, -- Umar Saif | http://people.csail.mit.edu/umar