The Analysis of BitTorrent Protocol Reliability in Modern Mobile Environment

Nowadays BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. Thanks to the advancement and prevalence of smart phones the usage of the protocol is increasing, since mobile devices are capable of joining BitTorrent swarms as well. The key of the protocol is to distribute content between peers therefore it is very important that peers have reliable network connections and provide the correct content. In this paper we analyze the reliability of BitTorrent protocol in mobile environment by observing the availability rate of peers and the poisoning phenomenon in the system. For this research we have collected anonymous statistics retrieved by clients using DrTorrent. DrTorrent is a BitTorrent client that we have implemented on the Android platform. It was published on Google Play Store almost half a year ago and we have collected many experiences since then. In this research we introduce statistics and real measurements about DrTorrent and highlight the key points and relationships. This work can be considered as a pioneer work in the field of modern smart phone peer-to-peer research.