Leveraging Bittorrent For End Host Measurements

Traditional methods of conducting measurements to end hosts require sending unexpected packets to measurement targets. Although existing techniques can ascertain end host characteristics accurately, their use in large-scale measurement studies is hindered by the fact that unexpected traffic can trigger alarms in common intrusion detection systems, often resulting in complaints from administrators. We describe BitProbes, a measurement system that works around this challenge. By coordinated participation in the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent system, BitProbes is able to unobtrusively measure bandwidth capacity, latency, and topology information for similar to 500,000 end hosts per week from only eight vantage points at the University of Washington. To date, our measurements have not generated a single complaint in spite of their wide coverage.