Understanding Swarms in BitTorrent
In the context of BitTorrent, a swarm refers to a group of peers actively sharing a specific torrent.
A torrent can have multiple swarms associated, and sometimes peers create their swarms.
It is important to note that sharing a file yourself is referred to as “seeding” rather than being part of a swarm.
Enabling File Sharing
A peer in the BitTorrent network is an end-user or client who utilizes the BitTorrent protocol on their computer to both download and upload torrents.
Peers interact with each other over the internet, exchanging information about torrents in order to share files through the BitTorrent protocol.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol that operates in a decentralized manner based on the end-to-end principle.
This means the network has no central point of failure or single control point.
Unlike traditional client-server architectures, BitTorrent does not rely on a central server or website for communication. Instead, peers communicate directly with each other.
Collaborative File Sharing
The BitTorrent protocol allows only one swarm to share a file at any time.
Think of a swarm as a conference call, where all participants are engaged in the same conversation.
Similarly, within a swarm, all peers share the same torrent and exchange data related to that specific file being shared.