Changing the unchoking policy for an enhanced bittorrent

In this paper, we propose a novel optimistic unchoking approach for the BitTorrent protocol whose key objective is to improve the quality of inter-connections amongst peers. In turn, this yields enhanced data distribution without penalizing underutilized and/or idle peers. The suggested policy takes into consideration the number of peers currently interested in downloading from a client that is to be unchoked. Our conjecture is that clients having few peers interested in downloading data from them should be favored with optimistic unchoke intervals. This will enable the clients in question to receive data since they become unchoked faster and consequently, they will trigger the interest of additional peers. In contrast, clients with plenty of "interested" peers should enjoy a lower priority to be selected as "planned optimistic unchoked" as they likely have enough data to forward and have saturated their uplinks. In this context, we increase the aggregate probability that the swarm obtains a higher number of interested-in-cooperation and directly-connected peers leading to improved peer inter-connection. Experimental results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms the existing optimistic unchoking policy.