Swarm #FFFF

Swarm #FFFF is a standard Bittorrent swarm used for discovery of peers using a zero-server approach. Possible applications are a marketplace for bandwidth, decentralized bootstrapping, and decentralised network measurements.

Current status: initial design

Uses the Khashmir DHT. Video-on-demand can be significantly enhanced when the boosting of friends is used. To make this generic and drop the requirement of having friends it's possible to craft a marketplace for offering and requesting bandwidth. An important research question is how to organise this matchmaking algorithm (push vs. pull).

Currently Tribler uses a large list of bootstrap superpeers to contact once after installation. These bootstrap superpeers merely provide a list of 20 Tribler peers currently online and connectable. Swarm #FFFF enhances this process by being able to bootstrap of the Mainline DHT. The bootstrap process is then reduced to requesting peers in Swarm #FFFF and finding a single online peer there and doing a successful Buddycast3 message exchange.

Sophisticated network-awareness is a key performance driver for P2P software. By creating a special swarm with a 66.6MByte test file each Tribler peer can quickly measure network download speed, network latency, and success rate of NAT/Firewall traversal methods.