# A week in the Life of the Most Popular BitTorrent Swarms

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Authors: Mark Scanlon; Alan Hannaway; M-Tahar Kechadi
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th Annual Symposium on Information Assurance (ASIA 2010)
Year: 2010
PDF: https://markscanlon.co/publications/AWeekInTheLifeOfTheMostPopularBitTorrentSwarms.pdf
Full text: https://markscanlon.co/publications/AWeekInTheLifeOfTheMostPopularBitTorrentSwarms.full.md

## Contribution Summary

This paper presents an analysis of the most popular BitTorrent swarms over a week, focusing on the scale of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. The investigation collected data on 8,489,287 unique IP addresses, with 50.6% of files split into smaller chunks for distribution. The results show a global distribution of peers, with the US, UK, India, and Canada being the top countries detected. The study also highlights the widespread use of BitTorrent for distributing copyrighted content, with 94.5% of the files being video content. The investigation's findings have implications for network usage prediction, bandwidth provisioning, and future network design.

## Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. In 2012, it was reported that P2P traffic consumed over 5,374 petabytes per month, which accounted for approximately 20.5% of consumer internet traffic. TV is the popular content type on The Pirate Bay (the world's largest BitTorrent indexing website). In this paper, an analysis of the swarms of the most popular pirated TV shows is conducted. The purpose of this data gathering exercise is to enumerate the peer distribution at different geolocational levels, to measure the temporal trend of the swarm and to discover the amount of cross-swarm peer participation. Snapshots containing peer related information involved in the unauthorised distribution of this content were collected at a high frequency resulting in a more accurate landscape of the total involvement. The volume of data collected throughout the monitoring of the network exceeded 2 terabytes. The presented analysis and the results presented can aid in network usage prediction, bandwidth provisioning and future network design.