Talk:BitTorrent Location-aware Protocol 1.0 Specification
Longitude and latitude are only slightly related to network topology and even less so bandwidth. You can make broad minimum latency assumptions based on distance, but in practice network load is a more significant factor for BitTorrent.
I would like to see an extension that made some guesses as to the best peers to be connected to from a swarm bandwidth perspective.
---
I don't mean to be blunt, but this is a very poorly designed protocol (Do YOU know your latitude and longitude? How is my torrent client supposed to know it)?. What is the purpose of MAC address (peers on local segment can be discovered with a broadcast)? How about clients that don't have a MAC address (PPP connection)? You can solve this problem much more simply, and without breaking the protocol by doing a whois on your external ip and favouring connections to peers which are under the same ISP. Fireice 06:25, 22 July 2007 (PDT)
---
About the MAC address. It will not be verified by the server. Since a local network can be behind a machine with it's own MAC address. It will just be associated with the IP. I just wanted to have some kind of a unique string for every client in the same local net that share the same public IP. So what better than a MAC address. I really didn't think if you don't have one. The solution can be the client side to generate a random one, but one time only. With the use of MAC address the server can distinguish clients for a long period of time.
Boian Petkantchin
---
Using LONG/LAT to decide which peer is best is at best not very good at all. What on want to do is using Autonomous System (AS) numbers to find locality. Peers with in the same AS should be used first, next ISPs that are peering with eachother should be used. After that some measurement of "length" between different AS:es (ISPs) should be used, preferable without having to transmit over transit links.
--IcEBnd 06:15, 5 January 2008 (PST)
There are some web services that give latitude and longitude (giving an IP address), though it would be easier just to post the country code.
I don't get what the peer-tracker handshake is for (is it absolutely necessary?). We could just send directly the peer list request with the location-aware protocol parameters added (latitude, longitude, mac_address), and when the tracker sees these parameters to consider the protocol (in case it is implemented), otherwise it just ignores them.
Sadly can't find any trackers that have implemented this protocol, considering that I always copy from peers from my country at a much higher rate, this would help a lot.