Motivation

Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may be interested in deploying BitTorrent caches to lower transit costs, reduce internal traffic, and improve user experience by speeding up downloads.

A cache is simply a fast peer in the middle of the network. It might also have substantial disk space. The client communicates with a cache using the normal BitTorrent protocol.

With this extension, BitTorrent clients are able to discover caches nearby on the network. When a cache is present, the user benefits from having a high capacity peer from which the user's client downloads and to which it can delegate seeding. When a cache inside the user's ISP network seeds on behalf of the client, it frees upstream capacity in the user's access network benefiting the user and those that share the access network. When subsequent peers transfer from their ISP's cache, the ISP experiences less transit traffic.

This is meant as a simpler alternative than presented in BEP-22 [3] though further from the intended usage of the Domain Name System (DNS) and existing standards.

The Discovery Mechanism

To find the caches for its ISP, a BitTorrent client performs a reverse DNS lookup on its external IP address, prepends "bittorrent-tracker" and resolves the resulting domain name to find the tracker. For example, a host with address 69.107.0.14 obtains the PTR record at

14.0.107.69.in-addr.arpa

The client's host IP address may not match the host's IP address as seen outside the client's private network. We address this in Section Network Address Translators.

The PTR resource record returned for this example contains domain name

adsl-69-107-0-14.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net

The client then resolves the domain name

bittorrent-tracker.adsl-69-107-0-14.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net

If no IP address(es) are found, one or more subsequent queries take place as described in Iterative Queries.

The returned tracker(s) are called cache trackers, but the protocol to talk to these trackers is no different from the standard BitTorrent tracker protocol described in [1].

When the BitTorrent client joins a swarm it announces to one or more of the trackers referenced in the .torrent file and announces to the cache tracker. The cache tracker returns peers which may be caches or other peers that announced the same file to the cache tracker.

A cache is a BitTorrent peer. A client MAY treat it preferentially.

Reverse DNS lookups are described in RFC 1034 [5].

Iterative Queries

The domain name returned from the reverse DNS lookup is specific to the querying host. In the naive implementation in DNS, there would be one bittorrent-tracker A or AAAA resource record for every querying host. The most obvious solution is to use a wildcard of the form:

bittorrent-tracker.*.pacbell.net

However, section 4.3.3 in [5] specifies that wildcards only appear as the first label in a domain name. This restriction was lifted in [7], but not with semantics applicable to our use case. An asterisk not at the beginning of a domain name is not treated like a wildcard. Only a lookup for the exact domain name

bittorrent-tracker.*.pacbell.net

matches.

We propose an alternative that avoids wildcards and allows suborganizations to override mappings provided by parent organizations: the peer starts by querying using its fully-qualified domain name returned from the reverse DNS lookup, and if this fails then it queries again after removing the most specific (leftmost) label in the domain name. For example, if no A/AAAA records are returned when querying for

bittorrent-tracker.adsl-69-107-0-14.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net

then the client queries for

bittorrent-tracker.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net

and then

bittorrent-tracker.pltn13.pacbell.net

The search removes one label at a time terminating when one or more resource records are found or before querying the root domain or top-level domains that are not ccTLDs, e.g., .com, .org, .net. We avoid querying the root or top-level domains given the low likelihood that caches would be defined globally, and thus clients would unnecessarily burden the root domain name servers with queries generating negative results. We considered stopping before querying country-level domains, but a country providing public infrastructure might choose to provide caches.

Network Address Translators

Many hosts on the Internet sit in private networks that connect to the Internet via a Network Address Translator (NAT). Such hosts may have an IP address allocated from one of the private IP address ranges defined by IANA, e.g., ranges with prefixes 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16. When communicating with hosts outside the private network, the NAT translates the private IP to a globally-routable IP address. This globally-routable address is the host's external IP address.

When finding a cache, the BitTorrent client must use its host's external IP address. A BitTorrent client can obtain its host's external IP either from the external ip key returned from a tracker implementing BEP 24 [4] or from peers using the yourip extension defined for the Extension Protocol proposed in [2].

Example

In our example, we use AT&T's PacBell network. AT&T could implement cache discovery by adding the following lines to the zone file for pacbell.net,

bittorrent-tracker.pacbell.net.      IN  A   206.13.28.15

Now when a client performs cache discovery, it performs three DNS queries removing labels before reaching the domain name pacbell.net, at which point the SRV record is returned and the client queries tracker.pacbell.net to obtain the domain names of caches.

In Python, the cache tracker's address can be obtained using the following:

import socket

tlds = ["com", "net", "org"]  # add more here.

name, aliases, ipaddrs = socket.gethostbyaddr("69.107.0.14")
names = name.split('.')
while names and names[0] not in tlds:
   name = "bittorrent-tracker." + ".".join(names)
   try:
     ip = socket.gethostbyname(name)
     break
   except:
     del names[0]

print "response=", ip

which might generate output like

response='151.164.129.4'

The answer above is fictional since AT&T does not at this time implement SRV records for BitTorrent trackers.

References

[1]	BEP_0003. The BitTorrent Protocol Specification, Cohen http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html

[2]	BEP_0010. Extension Protocol. Norberg, Strigeus, Hazel http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0010.html

[3]	BEP_0022. BitTorrent Cache Discovery Protocol. Harrison, Shalunov, Hazel. http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0010.html

[4]	BEP_0024. Tracker Returns External IP. Harrison http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0024.html

[5]	(1, 2) RFC-1034. DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND FACILITIES. Mockapetris, November 1987. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034

[6]	RFC-2782. A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV). Gulbrandsen, Vixie, Esibov. February 2000. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2782

[7]	RFC-4592. The Role of Wildcards in the Domain Name System. Lewis http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc4592.html

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.