Measuring Web Feature Impacts in BitTorrent-like Systems

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems, the attributes of resource description can influence the user behavior, especially on resource selection. However, this has been only qualitatively speculated but lacks of quantitative analysis. In this paper, we carry out a systematically quantitative study on the impact of these attributes presented in the form of web features, by measuring the largest BitTorrent website in CERNET. The measurement lasts for 31 days, and there are 168,610 records containing 11,228 distinct resources collected. The result is twofold. On one hand, it confirms the above qualitative speculation; on the other hand, it shows more significant findings: (1) with the highlight feature on popular items, the downloads of each resource yield to a long-tail distribution however deviating from Zipf Law; (2) publications with attracting titles disseminate 1.9 times faster than others; (3) publisher authority feature does not evidently help the system escaping from malicious resources' pervasion; (4) other features such as taxonomy and size also influence users' choice. We further demonstrate the implications of the web feature impact for system designers and potential attackers. © Copyright 2008 ICST