Friday, March 11, 2011

BitMate the "BitTorrent in developing countries"

Umar Saif, Associate Professor at the University of Lahore, Pakistan, has BitMate a BitTorrent client that has the particularity to be accessible with low-speed Internet connections. Why did you decide to develop a P2P [peer-to-peer] to developing countries? The peer-to-peer (P2P) represents almost 70% of the total traffic on the Internet, against 10% in developing countries.

The reason is that this protocol provides a platform very robust and scalable for large data transfers, electronic books to videos via patches computer. The problem is that the architecture of P2P clients like BitTorrent, is that the performance deteriorates much when using low-speed connections.

That's why we developed BitMate, which changes subtly BitTorrent mechanisms to adapt to the needs of developing countries without compromising the performance of peers that have better bandwidth. How does the customer BitMate, available since late February? BitMate as a customer, optimized for narrowband connections, favors peers who have the same type of Web access, unlike the generic strategy of regular BitTorrent clients.

Instead of wasting attempts to exchange data with peers who have a broadband connection, which errs on the side of optimism, peers have a similar rate. So, BitMate invests its scarce bandwidth resources on peers who are more likely to reciprocate. In parallel, BitMate retains equitable policy of BitTorrent, which emphasizes the mutual diffusion data.

In this way, the performance is better and the system is fairer, because users can create low-flow positive for all contacts. Tools like BitTorrent are often accused of promoting piracy. Do you think it will be the same for BitMate? Each technology, be it Internet, Web, P2P, or even email, so can be used unethically.

For example, despite the great utility of electronic mail, there are also spam. Similarly, BitTorrent is especially useful when it can transfer data in large quantities. At the same time, the protocol can be used to transfer pirated content. How does your system have been developed? BitMate is the result of over two years of academic research.

It is the work of one of my PhD students, Umair Waheed Khan. Our work was funded by an educational program of Pakistan, but also by the University of Berkeley and the U.S. State Department. How have you tested your system? We spent eight months testing and optimizing our clients on real computer networks or on platforms such as PlanetLab test.

To date, our client has been downloaded more than 10 000 times in 162 countries! In which countries BitMate could be adopted? Our system is specially made for connections with a throughput of between 5 and 20 Kb / s, which makes it very useful to countries in Asia, Africa or the Middle East.

But at the same time, users in North America, particularly those who use Internet at work or university, up nearly 30% of our original base. How do you change the P2P services? With its robust, P2P is the future of Internet data transfers. The fact that P2P is used for pirated content really shows the resilience of this system, because once the content is in this system, it is very difficult to block or delete them.

P2P will become the key to allow access to information in countries that have draconian censorship policies ...

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