Tribler: A social-based Peer-to-Peer system

Most current P2P file sharing systems treat their users as anonymous, unrelated entities, and completely disregard any social relationships between them. However, social phenomena such as friendship and the existence of communities of users with similar tastes may be well exploited in such systems, to increase their usability and performance. In this paper we present a novel social-based P2P file-sharing paradigm that exploits social phenomena by maintaining social networks and using these in content discovery, content recommendation, and downloading. Based on this paradigm's first class concepts such as taste groups, friends, and friends-offriends, we have designed and implemented the TRIBLER P2P filesharing system as a set of extensions to Bittorrent. We present and discuss the design of TRIBLER, and we show evidence that TRIBLER enables fast, trusted content discovery and recommendation at a low additional overhead, and a significant improvement in download performance