\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:related}

Measurements and improvements in Peer-to-Peer systems have been the focus of commercial and scientific players alike. Thorough analysis, a diversity of approaches, different interests have sparked a plethora of novel mechanisms, architectures, updates and extensions to existing applications as well as new and improved implementations to both old and new problems. Recent years have shown particular interest in the streaming capabilities of Peer-to-Peer solutions, resulting in a surge of updates, extensions and trials. Novel protocols such as swift are proof to the continuous birth of new protocols in the ever evolving Internet.

Most measurements and evaluations involving the BitTorrent protocol and applications are either concerned with the behavior of a real-world swarm or with the internal design of the protocol. There has been little focus on creating a self-sustained swarm management environment capable of deploying hundreds of controlled peers, and subsequently gathering results and interpreting them.

The PlanetLab infrastructure provides a realistic testbed for Peer-to-Peer experiments. PlanetLab nodes are connected to the Internet and experiments have a more realistic testbed where delays, bandwidth and other are subject to change. Tools are also available to aid in conducting experiments and data collection \cite{planetLab}.

Pouwelse et al. \cite{pouwelse} have done extensive analysis on the BitTorrent protocol using large real-world swarms focusing on the overall performance and user satisfaction. Guo et al. \cite{guo} have modeled the BitTorrent protocol and provided a formal approach to its functionality. Bharambe et al. \cite{bharambe} have done extensive studies on improving BitTorrent’s network performance.

Garbacki et al. \cite{garbacki} have created a simulator for testing 2Fast, a collaborative download protocol. The simulator is useful only for small swarms that require control. Real-world experiments involved using real systems communicating with real BitTorrent clients in the swarm.

