'Ono' - New Azureus Plugin Increases Download Speeds by 883%?

Experimental plugin uses CDN info to proactively find nearby peers, leading to a better response time and significantly improved download speeds.

Everybody in the BitTorrent community is always looking for ways to improve their download speeds. From the general methods like proper configuration and port forwarding to the more dubious like BitTyrant for example, the practice of ensuring maximum download speeds is an ongoing one.

So it's very interesting to learn that two researchers at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science have discovered a new way to increase BitTorrent transfer speeds. Fabián E. Bustamante, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Ph.D. student David Choffnes, together developed Ono - a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client.

"Finding nearby computers for transferring data may seem like a simple thing to do," says Choffnes, "but the problem is that the Internet doesn't have a Google Map. Every computer may have an address, but it doesn't tell you whether the machine is close to you."

Ono – Hawaiian for "delicious” – proactively finds and connects to peers that are closest to you. This leads to a better response time and significantly improved download speeds according to their reports.

"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," they write.

They continue:

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%).

I think the real selling point for the plugin is there in the last line,"...improves median rates by 883%!"

It's reported to have some 149,296 users as of this moment, with surely more to come. Bustamante is eager to see more users download and install the plugin.

"The more users we have, the better the system works, so we're just trying make it easy to spread," he says.

DOWNLOAD ONO

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