Improving sustainability of BitTorrent darknets

Private BitTorrent community, known as “BitTorrent Darknet” or “Private Tracker (PT)”, has received much attention in the research literature recently. Different from public BitTorrent community, PT can only be accessed by its registered members, and it can provide ultra-high downloading speed due to its effective Sharing Ratio Enforcement (SRE) incentive mechanism which stimulates members to contribute content as much as possible. Although the downloading performance in PTs with high Seeder-to-Leecher Ratio (SLR) is much better than in public BitTorrent communities, our measurements show that SRE mechanism can induce “Poor Downloading Motivation” problem for members who want to increase their sharing ratios to survive and thrive in PT. This problem may discourage PT members’ enthusiasm from contributing to community. To improve sustainability of PTs, we adopt the Predator–prey model to analyze high SLR phenomenon, study the optimal stable SLR range to PTs. Moreover, we develop a queuing model to simulate the seeding/leeching process in a single torrent in PT, and try to maximize the swarming performance with minimum seeding peers. This solution can help PT achieve the optimal SLR range.