BitTorrent & NAT: Enhancing Data Transfer & Distribution - Essay Sample

Introduction

BitTorrent refers to a technology that eases the forwarding and distribution of data, especially that of large capacities and less bandwidth consumption for the producer. Today, BitTorrent is one of the most famous people to person applications on the internet. NAT- Network Address Translation is a process of translating different IP addresses of computer devices in a given area to make a single IP address (Liu & Pan, 2009). The IP address created is often utilized by a router used to connect the devices to the internet. It prevents the other computers not connected in the local network; they can only view the IP addresses of the router. It also gives an added security feature, thus the router acting as a firewall that only provides access to the devices in the same network.

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There are several problems associated with NAT on BitTorrent-like P2P systems; First, Network Access Translation allows multiple computers to get access to the internet with only one IP address. It is a considerable challenge that affects the users of the machine directly. Besides, NAT limits the direction of connectivity. Some of the connections arriving dropped if there is no resolution made. NAT directly affects P2P applications in two ways. One, The P2P requests are running behind NAT. If the NAT connection is not sufficient, it cannot receive incoming links from other peers (Liu & Pan, 2009). It leads to NAT peers having fewer neighbors compared to public peers, which slows down their growth due to the rarest first strategy employed by Bit Torrent. Two, NAT peer has lower uplink volumes when compared with public peers.

The main idea of BitTorrent is a P2P file-sharing procedure used for distributing huge files. It assists to further the file distribution and to make good use of the uplink capability of all particular peers. BitTorrent is commonly used where after clients put the files on the central server, each of the clients downloads the data directly from the server. When downloading, the server consumes bandwidth equal to that of the size of the file. The larger the audience, the larger the file; hence the worse the bandwidth gets. With BitTorrent, clients can share whatever parts of the data they have (Liu & Pan, 2009). As the size of the audience and files increase, the bandwidth of the BitTorrent also increases. The clients connect to obtain multiple files at once. There are two kinds of peer leechers and seeds. Lechers are peers that are missing part of all the data, while seeds are peers with a whole file.

NAT strength is that it increases the connectivity for finale hosts with a private IP address but also confines connectivity to be unidirectional. NAT proposes Simple Traversal of UDP through NAT, Universal Plug and Play Interactive Connectivity Establishment, and Traversal Using Relay NAT (Liu & Pan, 2009). The network is associated with the following weaknesses. One, Address Translation is a memory and processor resource-consuming theory since NAT needs to interpret IPv4 addresses and keep the translation details in memory. Two, NAT may also cause a delay in IPv4 communication (Liu & Pan, 2009). Three, some network applicants and technologies will not function as expected in a Network Address Translation.

There can be a possible improvement made. Peers have to spend more time in downloading the files compared with public peers. A tit-for-tat strategy is a crucial factor in determining the tradeoff between the systems act, adjusting the optimal strategy to achieve the set goals and objectives. The simulation approach understands the impact that is caused-considering the possible employment of the NAT traversal technique.

References

Liu, Y., & Pan, J. (2009). The impact of NAT on BitTorrent-like P2P systems. 2009 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, 242-250. doi: 10.1109/p2p.2009.5284521