The Usage and Behavior Patterns of Mobile BitTorrent Clients

Abstract

With the many changes in mobile phone use, it is now common for users to connect to the Internet and share social and multimedia data, and peer-to-peer technology remains one of the most efficient solutions to content sharing. We analysed the lifecycle of content shared using the BitTorrent network, focusing on torrents retrieved by mobile phone clients using our MobTorrent application. MobTorrent, a complete BitTorrent client for feature phones, enables anonymous usage statistics to be collected. Based on statistics collected over the last three years, we analyze how mobile BitTorrent clients are being used. We discuss the success of individual sessions by additionally measuring peer connection download and success ratio statistics. This research can be considered as a pioneer work in the field of mobile content sharing solutions.