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Game changing torrent protocol |
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Written by Hideo
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Monday, 02 November 2009 |
 BitTorrent, the company behind the popular torrent clients μTorrent and BitTorrent posted that they were getting ready to "change the game" with the introduction of a new protocol dubbed μTP (micro-Transport Protocol). The protocol will be available with the launch of uTorrent 2.0 and BitTorrent 7.0. Idea behind introducing new protocol is to reduce unwanted traffic, speed up response and generally improve overall experience while using peer to peer networks. As a side-effect, most of now IP (ab)used torrent filtering software won’t be effective anymore.
As BitTorrent Company said in their post, that is not their attention,
as they are well aware that next versions of this software will can
easily block new protocol, but instead they want to eliminate need for
this kind of filtering. More in the full post:
"The fact is that our BitTorrent clients have become incredibly popular
with users downloading large files over the internet. So much so that
some observers claim that BitTorrent traffic accounts for 30%, 50%, or
even more of all Internet traffic. Regardless of the actual numbers
(which we have no way of knowing), it is clear that the popularity of
BitTorrent is putting such a burden on ISP networks that they sometimes
react by slowing down or interfering with that traffic.
Now there is a whole “net neutrality” debate, partly about whether
ISPs should be allowed to interfere with internet traffic from one
particular app simply because it is “too popular” – some argue that
perhaps ISPs could invest more so that supply meets demand – but this
debate is not the focus here. At BitTorrent we like to be a bit more
pragmatic, to assert that there is responsibility on the part of both
the ISPs and authors of popular applications like BitTorrent to make
sure that the internet scales smoothly to meet demand.
Which brings us back to μTP:
News of μTP started to leak to the public late last year with some wild
and totally untrue reporting that we were trying to make BitTorrent
more greedy and were somehow “declaring war” on users of other
applications. In fact completely the opposite is true, as was
subsequently acknowledged by the initial author’s follow-up article.
μTP is a completely new implementation of the BitTorrent protocol with
a major new design objective – μTP is designed to be network friendly –
to not swamp network connections when there are other apps trying to
send and receive – and to resolve the key problem that ISPs use to
justify interference with BitTorrent traffic.
If BitTorrent traffic volume is so great that it overwhelms end-users’
connections (leading to service calls from consumers whose internet
doesn’t work), then μTP eliminates this problem by being better at only
using bandwidth when there is no other traffic competing, and
automatically slowing or stopping BitTorrent transfers before network
connections seize up.
Legacy BitTorrent traffic uses the standard internet “TCP” protocol to
govern when it tries to go faster or slow down. The problem with TCP is
that it can only detect a problem by waiting to see if packets are
dropped. Unfortunately, by the time packets are being lost, the problem
is already acute and the consumers connection has already drastically
slowed or stopped. TCP is a lot like trying to drive with your eyes
closed. You only notice something’s wrong when you hit something.
μTP is like driving with your eyes *open* – μTP is able to see problems
coming and make much more modest adjustments to ensure the problems
don’t cause a car wreck. It does this by being able to detect
congestion on a network based on how long a packet takes to be sent
from one peer to the next. If things start to take longer, then μTP
adjusts the rate of sending accordingly.
As it happens, this trick has required some very deep engineering work
– the way the client talks to other clients has had to be completely
re-built. As a side effect, because the new protocol so different, it
is practically invisible to some of the nasty traffic shaping
techniques that some ISPs have been using. We doubt whether this happy
result will last for long, and nor is it the point of the technology.
The point is to reduce the need for such gear rather than to evade it.
Overall, when we get μTP stable, we’re excited about the potential
benefits that this could bring to ISPs by reducing the effective
burdens on their networks. Although we stand to gain nothing
financially from them for implementing it, we hope to maintain the lead
enjoyed by μTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline software as the most
popular BitTorrent clients, and hopefully demonstrate how innovation
from responsible stakeholders on a neutral internet can lead to winning
outcomes all-around."
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