Small Is Not Always Beautiful

@misc{citeulike:2354283, abstract = {Peer-to-peer content distribution systems have been enjoying great popularity, and are now gaining momentum as a means of disseminating video streams over the Internet. In many of these protocols, including the popular BitTorrent, content is split into mostly fixed-size pieces, allowing a client to download data from many peers simultaneously. This makes piece size potentially critical for performance. However, previous research efforts have largely overlooked this parameter, opting to focus on others instead. This paper presents the results of real experiments with varying piece sizes on a controlled BitTorrent testbed. We demonstrate that this parameter is indeed critical, as it determines the degree of parallelism in the system, and we investigate optimal piece sizes for distributing small and large content. We also pinpoint a related design trade-off, and explain how BitTorrent's choice of dividing pieces into subpieces attempts to address it.}, author = {Marciniak, Pawel and Liogkas, Nikitas and Legout, Arnaud and Kohler, Eddie }, citeulike-article-id = {2354283}, eprint = {0802.1015}, keywords = {bittorrent, content, distribution}, month = {Feb}, posted-at = {2008-02-08 17:35:30}, priority = {2}, title = {Small Is Not Always Beautiful}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.1015}, year = {2008} }

TY - ELEC ID - citeulike:2354283 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2354283 TI - Small Is Not Always Beautiful N2 - Peer-to-peer content distribution systems have been enjoying great popularity, and are now gaining momentum as a means of disseminating video streams over the Internet. In many of these protocols, including the popular BitTorrent, content is split into mostly fixed-size pieces, allowing a client to download data from many peers simultaneously. This makes piece size potentially critical for performance. However, previous research efforts have largely overlooked this parameter, opting to focus on others instead. This paper presents the results of real experiments with varying piece sizes on a controlled BitTorrent testbed. We demonstrate that this parameter is indeed critical, as it determines the degree of parallelism in the system, and we investigate optimal piece sizes for distributing small and large content. We also pinpoint a related design trade-off, and explain how BitTorrent's choice of dividing pieces into subpieces attempts to address it. KW - bittorrent KW - content KW - distribution AU - Marciniak, Pawel AU - Liogkas, Nikitas AU - Legout, Arnaud AU - Kohler, Eddie PY - 2008/Feb/07/ UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.1015 ER -