Motivation and Approach

The main goal of this plugin is simple -- to improve download speeds for your BitTorrent client. For most P2P applications, the decision regarding which peer to download from is generally arbitrary. When most peers offer good download performance, the random solution works well. However, if most peers are in a different part of the world from you, your downloads can really suffer.

The Ono plugin avoids this by proactively finding peers that are close to you (in a networking sense). These peers generally offer better response time, which can lead to significantly improved performance. We identify those peers that are near you by reusing network measurements from content distribution networks (CDNs), i.e. without performing extensive path measurement or probing.


Click for an interactive map of Ono coverage.

So does this work? In a word, yes. Using results collected from our participating users (well over 100,000 of them!), we have found that our system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%).

Our Ono plugin, which seamlessly installs into the Vuze (formerly Azureus) BitTorrent client, can be downloaded from >>>here<<<. Join the 212,785 users who have already done so from all over the world ...

Developers: If you want to integrate Ono into your application, see this page.

NEW: If you like this plugin, consider helping us beta test NEWS, our newly released plugin that uses BT to monitor the Internet (and your ISP).


News

Why Ono?

Ono is the Hawaiian word not only for the King Mackerel fish, but also for "good to eat". The word has an extremely positive connotation, and we hope you'll find our plugin as tasty as Ono itself. The Ono fish is also known as the "wahoo", a feeling that we hope you'll express upon noticing the increased speed of your downloads. Finally, Ono merges the theme of our research group (the Aqualab) with one of the CDNs on which we currently rely for network measurements--Akamai (Hawaiian for "clever").

People

Publications

Resources

Frequently Asked Questions

Problems and Solutions