Systematic Support for Content Bundling in BitTorrent Swarming

BitTorrent has achieved a huge success, being estimated to account for Internet traffic. The ever increasing usage of BitTorrent is due to some attractive properties of its swarming systems. First, cooperation among peers in a swarm results from the tit-for-tat based incentive mechanism to improve the overall system performance in terms of throughput. Second, the tit-for-tat strategy also prevents the free-riding problem. Third, the swarming technique scales well even in the presence of massive flash crowds for popular contents. Despite the strengths of BitTorrent, its swarming system suffers from a fundamental limitation: little or no availability of contents often. That is, peers arriving after the initial flash crowd may end up with finding the content unavailable, not to mention unpopular contents. This paper is motivated by the conjecture: "So far, content bundling in BitTorrent has been done manually and in an ad hoc manner decided by publishers. If bundling is supported systematically in an automatic and efficient fashion, we believe that the system may enhance the availability and download speed".