BitMate: A BitTorrent Client for Poor Bandwidth People

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BitTorrent is an excellent tool for sharing large files online, which is why millions of people use it every day. In developing third world countries, however, BitTorrent usage falls far behind, mainly because the transfer speeds are not that great on low bandwidth connections. Thanks to a new BitTorrent client, funded by a grant from the U.S. State Department, this situation can look forward to positive change.

A few days ago a new BitTorrent client surfaced under the promising name BitMate. The client is developed by a group of researchers from several well respected universities who have collaborated to improve the lives of BitTorrent aficionados in developing countries.

The aim of BitMate is to drastically improve the download speeds of peers on low-bandwidth connection (5 to 20 KB/sec), to make BitTorrent more effective in places where people might need it the most. If we believe the claims of the researchers, they have succeeded in making a difference.

TorrentFreak contacted Dr.Umar Saif, Associate Professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and leader of the initiative, to learn more about the new BitTorrent client.

“We have spent close to 2 years experimenting with various tweaks in BitTorrent, using both real-world and synthetic swarms. BitMate is our first public release and is an ongoing project,” Saif said.

During the latest tests the researchers found that compared to traditional clients, the download speeds on low bandwith connections can receive up to a 70% boost with BitMate, while upload contributions may improve by up to 1000%.

“In our target conditions, Bitmate can almost double the download performance. At the same time, it performs at least as well as the traditional BitTorrent clients for high-bandwidth peers,” Saif noted.

The beauty of it all, is that other peers are not negatively affected by these improvements.

“BitMate enhances the performance of low-bandwidth nodes without cheating, circumventing the fairness policy of BitTorrent or adversely affecting the performance of other peers,” Saif told TorrentFreak.

Among other things, BitMate can establish this advantage by prioritizing connections to other slow peers, by minimizing cross-ISP traffic and by avoiding redundant downloads. Combined with several other optimizations, the Vuze-based BitMate client is able to speed up downloads on slow connections.

“Instead of wasting optimistic unchokes on high bandwidth peers, a BitMate client optimistically unchokes those peers that have a similar low-bandwidth. As a result, a BitMate client invests its scarce upload bandwidth on peers that are most likely to reciprocate.”

“At the same time, BiTMate leaves the tit-for-tat reciprocal unchoke policy untouched to uphold the fairness of BitTorrent. This leads to both increased performance and fairness since low-bandwidth clients can quickly form mutually beneficial peer-to-peer connections,” Saif said.

A win-win situation for all BitTorrent users, generously funded by the U.S. State Department. It’s almost too good to be true.

BitMate’s latest version was released to the public three days ago and can be downloaded for free. Although the project is aimed at developing countries, there are plenty of people in other parts of the world that are on a slow connection, and might benefit from BitMate.

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http://torrentfreak.com/images/bitmate1.jpg

Looks like a quite interesting idea and conceptually it is correct. Besides, being Vuze based is a enough reason to know it is a well coded client.

sounds like a cheat client...

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Among other things, BitMate can establish this advantage by prioritizing connections to other slow peers, by minimizing cross-ISP traffic and by avoiding redundant downloads.

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Reminded me of the Ono plugin for Azureus, which has existed for a while already. (I tried that, but didn't like how it continuously ran pings and traceroutes)

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Originally Posted by Vorx

sounds like a cheat client...

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Evidently, you didn't even read the damn article.

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Originally Posted by Vorx

sounds like a cheat client...

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Somehow, every post from you that I read is slightly to grossly retarded... :eyebrows:

From my understanding of the article, it basically keeps the low bandwidth users amongst themselves (by prioritising the traffic between them) while not hurting / slowing down the fast connections. Sounds like a good plan.

This could probably be implemented by the established clients, too. Since it's open source, it shouldn't be too difficult.

I think we're overlooking the fact that if you have a shit connection [say 5kB/s], then you have a shit connection [you aren't going to get more than 5kB/s].

That's a given. The point is to utilise those shitty 5KB/s more efficiently than bittorrent clients do today.

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Originally Posted by KFlint

Somehow, every post from you that I read is slightly to grossly retarded... :eyebrows:

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Was that worth your 5000th post? :D

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Originally Posted by shipwreck

That's a given. The point is to utilise those shitty 5KB/s more efficiently than bittorrent clients do today.

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That's correct.

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Originally Posted by shipwreck

That's a given. The point is to utilise those shitty 5KB/s more efficiently than bittorrent clients do today.

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Last I checked BT:
Shares the rarest piece first
Send more requests to those with best upload speed

Thus making it efficient anyway, also demonstrated by Facebook's use of BT to update servers. The largest waste is the connection overhead between peers, especially with uTP or whatever that BW management shite was called; hence if you want a more efficient connection, just gotta connect to less people [Funny paradox no?].

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Originally Posted by TONiC

Last I checked BT:
Shares the rarest piece first
Send more requests to those with best upload speed

Thus making it efficient anyway

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The specific mechanics this works under can be found here. BT is efficient by design, but BitMate is even more so, based on the assumption you're using a low-speed connection. It aims at conserving bandwidth and choosing peers that are as little hops away as possible, and therefore have lower latencies. Sounds pretty sensible to me.

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if you want a more efficient connection, just gotta connect to less people [Funny paradox no?].

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That's also correct. Extra connections also bring more overhead (something BM attempts to minimize), and that's less "real" traffic available for transfers. If you can count your download speed with your fingers, it may be wise to use a similar figure for the maximum connections amount.

I get warm, fuzzy feelings when I see something that is developed with the core ideals of filesharing (BT) in mind. :happy:

Ideally, though, more money would be spent helping those left-behind countries develop higher-speed connections. And perhaps get them some clean water, medicines, and food. :(

Who needs food when you can have a gigabit link at home?

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It aims at conserving bandwidth and choosing peers that are as little hops away as possible, and therefore have lower latencies. Sounds pretty sensible to me.

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But how does choosing the nearest peers guarantee efficiency? Especially as we know the connection efficiency is correlated between the total number of connections. Considering the fact that if you live in an area/country who's infrastructure is no good [otherwise you wouldn't really have much reason to use such a client], where if you have a DL speed of 5kB/s then the average upload speed can't be very impressive either [in the UK you can get 50mbit/1mbit, scale it down to 5kB/s download]... so connecting to "local" peers only [from a national perspective] may not even end up maxing out your own shit connection??¬!?1

This was covered by that Dritte link saying:

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designed to minimize cross-ISP traffic... BitMate matches peer locality as well as bandwidth.

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So essentially, this program saves your [shitty] ISP money, which is likely not to be reinvested in your local infrastructure. If it's basing it on BW now as well, then it's doing what a "normal" BT client does then.


I'm sure many people will find this program useful in providing some comfort knowing that they'll save themselves a few hours/days/weeks, but 10 years sitting in front of a computer has told me that "download accelerators" are either unnoticably useless or just a trojan.

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

Was that worth your 5000th post? :D

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I didn't even notice!

Just demote me now, I want those silver (well... grey) stars now :lol:

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Originally Posted by KFlint

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

Was that worth your 5000th post? :D

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I didn't even notice!

Just demote me now, I want those silver (well... grey) stars now :lol:

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Yer just like an old lady with a bad dye job- gray underneath, blue on the surface. :D

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Originally Posted by TONiC

But how does choosing the nearest peers guarantee efficiency? Especially as we know the connection efficiency is correlated between the total number of connections. Considering the fact that if you live in an area/country who's infrastructure is no good [otherwise you wouldn't really have much reason to use such a client], where if you have a DL speed of 5kB/s then the average upload speed can't be very impressive either [in the UK you can get 50mbit/1mbit, scale it down to 5kB/s download]... so connecting to "local" peers only [from a national perspective] may not even end up maxing out your own shit connection??¬!?1

This was covered by that Dritte link saying:

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designed to minimize cross-ISP traffic... BitMate matches peer locality as well as bandwidth.

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So essentially, this program saves your [shitty] ISP money, which is likely not to be reinvested in your local infrastructure. If it's basing it on BW now as well, then it's doing what a "normal" BT client does then.


I'm sure many people will find this program useful in providing some comfort knowing that they'll save themselves a few hours/days/weeks, but 10 years sitting in front of a computer has told me that "download accelerators" are either unnoticably useless or just a trojan.

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Hmmm who to believe Tonic or a " group of researchers from several well respected universities" ? Attachment 68449

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Originally Posted by IdolEyes787

Hmmm who to believe Tonic or a " group of researchers from several well respected universities" ? Attachment 68449

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'Knew something like this was coming :P

So I saved my most daunting point for last:
By connecting to more "local" [nationally] you increase the risk of connecting to MPAA/Copyright firms in your country... 3 strikes? Hell, gimme a 4th. 700Euro fine? I'll take two. Tell me I lie.

Well i DID only read the first 2 paragraphs. TL;DR

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Originally Posted by TONiC

So I saved my most daunting point for last:
By connecting to more "local" [nationally] you increase the risk of connecting to MPAA/Copyright firms in your country...

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We are talking about countries with minimal infrastructure, unclean water, scarce food resources, with children going blind from lack of basic vitamins- while not necessarily beneath MPAA/RIAA lawyers, these countries are doubtfully on the "high priority pursuit list". :idunno:

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

We are talking about countries with minimal infrastructure, unclean water, scarce food resources, with children going blind from lack of basic vitamins- while not necessarily beneath MPAA/RIAA lawyers, these countries are doubtfully on the "high priority pursuit list". :idunno:

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Agreed 100%, but bear in mind this program can be downloaded and used by anyone, especially by n00bs who tend to be sucked into to "faster downloads!>!!>" style programs. Australia and NZ still have a monopolised infrastructure, offering 512mbyte traffic/month [joy!], though this is soon gunna change.

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Originally Posted by Vorx

Well i DID only read the first 2 paragraphs. TL;DR

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I can see how sounding out all of the words phonetically would be quite taxing...

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Originally Posted by TONiC

Agreed 100%, but bear in mind this program can be downloaded and used by anyone, especially by n00bs who tend to be sucked into to "faster downloads!>!!>" style programs.

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Most RIAA/MPAA "stink operations" end up being little more than shakedown/extortion schemes. In order for these to be successful, they need to pursue individuals who can be coerced into paying. IP addresses from extremely poor areas would most likely be rejected. I also doubt that those who can only download 1-2 movies per week would be more likely to attract attention than those who can grab and seed hundreds of shows/songs constantly among many, many peers.

You have been defeated on all points, good sir. Surrender. :)

*Unedited, but noted- I meant to say "sting operation", not "stink operation", but due to the fact that they are conducted by MPAA?RIAA lawyers, I'll leave it as is. :D

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

Most RIAA/MPAA "stink operations" end up being little more than shakedown/extortion schemes. In order for these to be successful, they need to pursue individuals who can be coerced into paying. IP addresses from extremely poor areas would most likely be rejected. I also doubt that those who can only download 1-2 movies per week would be more likely to attract attention than those who can grab and seed hundreds of shows/songs constantly among many, many peers.

You have been defeated on all points, good sir. Surrender. :)

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Hehehehehe!
One argument against me was "Who you gunna believe?", so I wouldn't say I was exactly annihilated by answers presented :P
A buck is a buck bro; doesn't matter if they're rich or poor <--- Just look at how this recession started; American mortgage companies lending to poor african americans, aka porch loans. I doub there is any descrimination between IPs, but having said this...

I step off my high horse and let it gallop the fuck away from me... gunna spark up this joint ;)
You win!

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Originally Posted by TONiC

So essentially, this program saves your [shitty] ISP money, which is likely not to be reinvested in your local infrastructure. If it's basing it on BW now as well, then it's doing what a "normal" BT client does then.

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Normal clients don't act like that. They pick peers randomly as far as geographical location is concerned.

Very often providers increase speeds to hosts on their own network, since they have no extra peering costs to pay. This is what I think they're getting at with:

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find local peers that may offer better bandwidth due to better path properties

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In this case, clients like BitMate would be greatly helpful. Otherwise, what you're saying would be mostly right. One could argue that with a very slow connection, only a few other peers will be required to max it out, but as long as speeds are asynchronous there will never be enough for everyone.

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Originally Posted by TONiC

So I saved my most daunting point for last:
By connecting to more "local" [nationally] you increase the risk of connecting to MPAA/Copyright firms in your country... 3 strikes? Hell, gimme a 4th. 700Euro fine? I'll take two. Tell me I lie.

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What megabyteme said (and I thought that before I read his post). Countries where connection speeds are so slow are unlikely to care about who's downloading what.

Hell, the infrastructure in my place isn't so bad (30Mbit Cable is available, and FTTH at 50Mbit is slowly becoming more accessible), and no one cares about piracy either. :idunno:

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Originally Posted by TONiC

Agreed 100%, but bear in mind this program can be downloaded and used by anyone, especially by n00bs who tend to be sucked into to "faster downloads!>!!>" style programs.

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Noobs will be put off by the fact this can't be used with uTorrent! :D

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Originally Posted by TONiC

Hehehehehe!
One argument against me was "Who you gunna believe?", so I wouldn't say I was exactly annihilated by answers presented :P
A buck is a buck bro; doesn't matter if they're rich or poor <--- Just look at how this recession started; American mortgage companies lending to poor african americans, aka porch loans. I doub there is any descrimination between IPs, but having said this...

I step off my high horse and let it gallop the fuck away from me... gunna spark up this joint ;)
You win!

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:lol: Enjoy your joint, TONiC. Since I don't have one, you win after all. :(

Off topic: Anon you win as well

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Originally Posted by TONiC

Off topic: Anon you win as well

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Yay! :hooray:

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Originally Posted by Vorx

sounds like a cheat client...

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where is the dumbest post award?

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Originally Posted by bijoy

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Originally Posted by Vorx

sounds like a cheat client...

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where is the dumb as a post award?

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Fixed.

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Originally Posted by bijoy

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Originally Posted by Vorx

sounds like a cheat client...

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where is the dumbest post award?

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:lol:

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Originally Posted by bijoy

where is the dumbest post award?

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Wherever it is that you stored it. :shifty:

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

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Originally Posted by bijoy

where is the dumbest post award?

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Wherever it is that you stored it. :shifty:

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:emo:

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Originally Posted by sakibten

utorrent 1.6.1 FTW

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Enjoy running such an old and vulnerable version. I prefer removing all the "sensitive" things in newer versions directly from the executable, instead.

That or you can use another client. uTorrent's not the only one around, nor the most feature-filled.

To me the best one to use is utorrent1.8.5
Using it for more than 1 year & the most imp point about it is, it is bug free & never causes crushing & cache buffering problem.

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Originally Posted by bijoy

To me the best one to use is utorrent1.8.5
Using it for more than 1 year & the most imp point about it is, it is bug free

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No software is bug free. Just look at the changelog for the 2.x branch and all the issues they solved.