libtorrent
Description: A feature complete BitTorrent protocol implementation as a C++ library

# Streaming implementation

Version: | 2.0.8

This documents describes the algorithm libtorrent uses to satisfy time critical piece requests, i.e. streaming.

# streaming vs sequential_download

Libtorrent's `sequential_download` mode and the time-critical logic can be understood as two different ways of managing peer request queues.

`sequential_download` will simply wait until a queue slot opens up, and request the next piece in the sequence. This mechanism is even simpler than the classic "rarest-first" algorithm; it does a good job of keeping request queues full, thus saturating available download bandwidth; and pieces do arrive roughly in-order. However, it's sub-optimal for streaming: piece 0 may be requested from a slow peer, and fast peers will get requests for later-index pieces instead of retrying more-critical ones.

The time-critical logic does more active management of peer request queues, such that the most time-critical pieces occupy the "best" queue slots, across all peers. It can be considered an advanced version of `sequential_download`. The main trade-off is that it is more complex to implement and utilize.

# piece picking

The standard bittorrent piece picker is peer-centric. A peer unchokes us or we complete a block from a peer and we want to make another request to that peer. The piece picker answers the question: which block should we request from this peer.

When streaming, we have a number of time critical pieces, the ones the video or audio player will need next to keep up with the stream. To keep the deadlines of these pieces, we need a mechanism to answer the question: I want to request blocks from this piece, which peer is the most likely to be able to deliver it to me the soonest.

This question is answered by `torrent::request_time_critical_pieces()` in libtorrent.

At a high level, this algorithm keeps a list of peers, sorted by the estimated download queue time. That is, the estimated time for a new request to this peer to be received. The bottom 10th percentile of the peers (the 10% slowest peers) are ignored and not included in the peer list. Peers that have choked us, are not interesting, is on parole, disconnecting, have too many outstanding block requests or is snubbed are also excluded from the peer list.

The time critical pieces are also kept sorted by their deadline. Pieces with an earlier deadline first. This list of pieces is iterated, starting at the top, and blocks are requested from a piece until we cannot make any more requests from it. We then move on to the next piece and request blocks from it until we cannot make any more. The peer each request is sent to is the one with the lowest download queue time. Each time a request is made, this estimate is updated and the peer is resorted in this list.

Any peer that doesn't have the piece is ignored until we move on to the next piece.

If the top peer's download queue time is more than 2 seconds, the loop is terminated. This is to not over-request. `request_time_critical_pieces()` is called once per second, so this will keep the queue full with margin.

# download queue time

Each peer maintains the number of bytes that have been requested from it but not yet been received. This is referred to as `outstanding_bytes`. This number is incremented by the size of each outgoing request and decremented for each payload byte received.

This counter is divided by an estimated download rate from the peer to form the estimated download queue time. That is, the estimated time it will take any new request to this peer to begin being received.

The estimated download rate of a peer is not trivial. There may not be any outstanding requests to the peer, in which case the payload download rate will be zero. That would not be a reasonable estimate of the rate we would see once we make a request.

If we have not received any payload from a peer in the last 30 seconds, we must use an alternative estimate of the download rate. If we have received payload from this peer previously, we can use the peak download rate.

If we have received less than 2 blocks (32 kiB) and we have been unchoked for less than 5 seconds ago, use the average download rate of all peers (that have outstanding requests).

# timeouts

An observation that is useful to keep in mind when streaming is that your download capacity is likely to be saturated by your peers. In this case, if the swarm is well seeded, most peers will send data to you at close to the same rate. This makes it important to support streaming from many slow peers. For instance, this means you can't make assumptions about the download time of a block being less than some absolute time. You may be downloading at well above the bit rate of the video, but each individual peer only transfers at 5 kiB/s.

In this state, your download rate is a zero-sum-game. Any block you request that is not urgent, will take away from the bandwidth you get for peers that are urgent. Make sure to limit requests to useful blocks only.

Some requests will stall. It appears to be very hard to have enough accuracy in the prediction of download queue time such that all requests come back within a reasonable amount of time.

To support adaptive timeouts, each torrent maintains a running average of how long it takes to complete a piece. There is also a running average of the deviation from the mean download time.

This download time is used as the benchmark to determine when blocks have timed out, and should be re-requested from another peer.

If any time-critical piece has taken more than the average piece download time + a half average deviation form that, the piece is considered to have timed out. This means we are allowed to double-request blocks. Subsequent passes over this piece will make sure that any blocks we don't already have are requested one more time.

In fact, this scales to multiple time-outs. The time since a download was started is divided by average download time + average deviation time / 2. The resulting integer is the number if times the piece has timed out.

Each time a piece times out, another busy request is allowed to try to make it complete sooner. A busy request is where a block is requested from a peer even though it has already been requested from another peer.

This has the effect of getting more and more aggressive in requesting blocks the longer it takes to complete the piece. If this mechanism is too aggressive, a significant amount of bandwidth may be lost in redundant download (keep in mind the zero-sum game).

It never makes sense to request a block twice from the same peer. There is logic in place to prevent this.

# optimizations

One optimization is to buffer all piece requests while looping over the time- critical pieces and not send them until one round is complete. This increases the chances that the request messages are coalesced into the same packet. This in turn lowers the number of system calls and network overhead.