Implementation of Proxy to Make Content Shared on BitTorrent Retrievable from CCN
Kohei Okazaki, Junichi Funasaka · 2024
In the modern era, it's widely acknowledged that the Internet Protocol (IP), originally designed for location-based communication, is increasingly misaligned with today's content-centric network usage. This divergence has led to the emergence of partial solutions like Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols such as BitTorrent. While these technologies address the immediate need for efficient content delivery, they do not offer a fundamental resolution to the issues arising from the growing disconnect between IP's original design philosophy and contemporary network demands. Recent years have seen the advent of new networking architectures like Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Content-Centric Networking (CCN). These groundbreaking designs aim to align network operations more closely with content-centric usage patterns. However, they struggle with compatibility issues when interfacing with the existing IP-based systems, a challenge that hinders their widespread adoption. This study introduces a proxy implementation that allows content from BitTorrent to be retrieved by CCN clients, filling a significant gap in the literature by confirming the feasibility of such an approach. Our experimental results indicate that the proxy enables content retrieval at about 85% of BitTorrent's standalone performance, accounting for inevitable overheads. Moreover, our data show that when CCN content caches are available, retrieval speeds can indeed surpass those of standalone BitTorrent.