Evaluating the impact of Software-Defined Networks' Reactive Routing on bittorrent performance

Software-Defined Networks' technologies introduce programmatic ways to reorganize the network logical topology. To achieve this, the switches in the network interact with a set of controllers, these controllers can dynamically update the switches configuration based in received events. A possible practical field of use of Software-Defined Networks' is the one called Reactive Routing. On Reactive Routing the logical topology is continuously evolving based on traffic statistics as load or jitter which can be collected by the switches. BitTorrent is a well-known peer-to-peer protocol used on application layer to achieve fast propagation of content. In an effort to find the best set of connections that maximizes the global aggregation of throughput without knowledge from underlying topology, BitTorrent uses choking algorithms that continuously open and close connections to different peers. Software Defined Networks implementing Reactive Routing may be negatively affecting the performances of the system under specific conditions because of it lack of knowledge of BitTorrent strategies. Here, we review the concepts involved in Software-Defined Networks and BitTorrent protocol, we propose a classification of scenarios where these technologies may interact, we discuss hypotheses about possible problems arising from these interaction and we show our preliminary experimental results from study the phenomena