Xunlei: Peer-Assisted Download Acceleration on a Massive Scale
01 March 2012
We take a close look at Xunlei, an enormously popular download acceleration application in China. Xunlei forms a complex ecosystem, interacting with independent HTTP and FTP servers, cyberlockers (such as megadownlod and hotfile), and the BitTorrent and eDonkey file-sharing systems. Performing a protocol analysis on Xunlei, we developed a comprehensive measurement infrastructure, enabling us to gain new insights into the scale of Xunlei's content indexing, swarm size scales, and several unique characteristics of Xunlei's operation.