Tribler: A Social-Based Peer-to-Peer System

Most current P2P file-sharing systems treat their users as anonymous, unrelated entities, and completely disregard any social relationships between them. However, social phenomena such as friendship and the existence of communities of users with similar tastes or interests may well be exploited in such systems in order to increase their usability and performance. In this paper we present a novel social-based P2P filesharing paradigm that exploits social phenomena by maintaining social networks and using these in content discovery, content recommendation, and downloading. Based on this paradigm’s main concepts such as taste buddies and friends, we have designed and implemented the TRIBLER P2P file-sharing system as a set of extensions to Bittorrent. We present and discuss the design of TRIBLER, and we show evidence that TRIBLER enables fast content discovery and recommendation at a low additional overhead, and a significant improvement in download performance.