Study on geographical distribution and availability of BitTorrent peers sharing video files

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems are becoming part of the daily life of content consumers. The traffic generated by P2P systems, and particularly BitTorrent, represents the major portion of the global Internet traffic, largely overtaking the traffic share of the World Wide Web. Nowadays, we see P2P systems evolving towards a Video on Demand (VoD) platform. One of the main challenges of these systems is to efficiently share data in the dynamic and continuously evolving Ad-Hoc networks of users. This ability heavily depends on the peers' locations and characteristics on this type of networks. In this paper, we use the current BitTorrent system to evaluate the peer-level characteristics of users sharing video contents. These characteristics include geographical location, peers availability and peers "distance", measured in terms of the round trip time. From the results obtained, we conclude that peers sharing video content present some unexpected locality features that, if conveniently exploited, could greatly benefit VoD P2P systems both in technological and service marketing terms.