Joining BitTorrent and swift to improve P2P transfers

Abstract

In the last decade, Internet became a new mean to disseminate information, changing the initial paradigms of the network. At the same time, P2P networks became successful to share data between final users. One of the most successful P2P systems is BitTorrent, responsible of more than the 50% of current Internet traffic. Despite this success, BitTorrent lacks some features to become the silver bullet for massive content distribution. With the aim to solve some of this problem, a new protocol called swift was designed. swift is described to be a multiparty transport protocol, with the mission to efficiently disseminate content among a swarm of peers. Novel structures, advanced requesting/acknowledging techniques and bandwidth-efficient congestion control algorithms were used in the design of the protocol. The goal of this project is to build a first prototype of integration of the new transport protocol into an already existing BitTorrent client. The only current implementation of swift, libswift, will be used as the transport layer. A new module for Tribler must be built in order to join the BitTorrent and the libswift operation.