Green Proxy-Based Approaches for BitTorrent

Energy efficiency in P2P systems has become a prominent issue due to significant portions of the Internet traffic devoted to P2P protocols. In this paper, we address the approaches for energy efficiency in BitTorrent Protocol. First, we provide a classification of the existing energy efficient BitTorrent studies, and then propose multi-proxy and private proxy approaches to minimize energy consumption. We develop energy cost formulations for our proposed protocols as well as the legacy BitTorrent. The performance of multi-proxy and private proxy BitTorrent is analyzed through a comprehensive set of simulations performed on Peersim for the energy consumption and average download time metrics. For the multi-proxy protocol, we investigate the effect of increasing the number of proxies on the overlay. We also present preliminary experimental results on large-scale scenarios revealing that the proxy-based schemes reduce the energy consumption up to 80% without any performance degradation in comparison to the legacy BitTorrent.