Top: Computers: Internet: Technology: Bit Torrent
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Bram Cohen, an American computer programmer, designed Bitorrent in April 2001. The first implementation was on 2 July 2001. BitTorrent is maintained BitTorrent, Inc.
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1) A client creates a "torrent" file which contains metadata about the files to be shared, tracker information and uploads into a tracker for coordination purpose
2) The tracker will serve as an indexing server to serve the clients, not distributing the data
3) Clients will download the torrent file and download the files using a BitTorrent Client
4) The BitTorrent Client will connect to the tracker and retrieves a list of other users(peers) which has a piece of the data
5) Peers will then connect to each other and retrieve data from each other piece by piece, downloading and uploading data simultaneously
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Distributed Hash Table
Distributed Hash Table(DHT) implementation was first implemented in June 2005. It allows a BitTorrent client to get pieces of a torrent file without going through the tracker. Should a tracker goes offline, users will still be able to download the file from other peers.
Peer Exchange
Peer exchange (PEX) is utilized to gather peers. Using peer exchange, a peer asks other peers if they know of even more peers elsewhere. This may improve (local) transfer performance.
Protocol Encryption
There exist 3 types of protocol encryption, notably:
- Protocol encryption (PE)
- Message stream encryption (MSE)
- Protocol header encrypt (PHE)
Protol Encryption is implemented into BitTorrent in an attempt to make the BitTorrent traffic harder to be identified by other parties, including Internet Service Providers who are actively throttling the BitTorrent connections.
Most up to date BitTorrent clients has build in some sort of Protocol encryption technology and is compatible with one another.
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