CODEWITHSUNDEEP
connectionbittorrentpeer
alex.49.98
alex.49.98

Reputation: 629

How to use peer connection in torrent protocol?

I'm trying to understand how to correctly implement p2p communication for the torrent protocol. Specification is not clear on this account.

If I, as a client, connect to a peer, then send the handshake, establishing communication, then I can send messages to that peer and receive responses. That is quite understandable from the client standpoint. What I don't understand is if the peer wants to send certain requests to me, in this case the peer is in a client role and I'm a peer in regards to it, will it use the same opened connection which I initiated or will it try to establish a new connection?

That leads to another question. Is it possible or is it normal to establish multiple connections to the same peer?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 1516

Answers (1)

the8472
the8472

Reputation: 43042

in this case the peer is in a client role

As far as the wire protocol goes there is no special 'client role' distinct from a server role. Both peers are equal and perform and support the same set of operations - give or take some protocol extensions.

Hence peer-to-peer.

The term client in the context of bittorrent simply means any participant in the network. In specs it's often used interchangeably with implementation and peer.

TCP connections are bidirectional. In bittorrent each stream consist of an endless flows of messages that is not in lockstep with the other direction. I.e. there is no request-response cycle.

Is it possible or is it normal to establish multiple connections to the same peer?

possible? yes, assuming the <source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port> tuple is distinct, which basically is what TCP demands.

But other implementations are likely to drop duplicate connections.

Upvotes: 4

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