Evaluating Forward Error Correction performance in BitTorrent protocol

BitTorrent is probably the most famous file-sharing protocol used in the Internet currently. It represents more than half of the P2P traffic. Various applications are using BitTorrent-like protocols to deliver the resource and implement techniques to perform a reliable data transmission. Forward Error Correction (FEC) is an efficient mechanism used for this goal. This paper proposes a performance evaluation of FEC implemented on BitTorrent protocol. A simulation framework has been developed to evaluate the improvement depending on many factors like the leeches/seeds number and capacities, the network nature (homogeneous or heterogeneous), the resource size, and the FEC redundancy ratio. The completion time metric shows that FEC is a method that accelerates the data access in some specific network configurations. On the contrary, this technique can also disrupt the system in some cases since it introduces an overhead.