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With the recent constant increase in internet related energy consumption, researchers are trying to address one main contributing factor – Running PCs 24/7 to run BitTorrents. A new architecture is being proposed to reduce the energy consumption and also reduce the download time. While promising, the architecture comes with a major limitation.

It is estimated that 74 TeraWatts hours (TWh) per year of electricity is consumed by internet. This 74 TWh is comprised of the energy consumed at data centers as well as the individual PCs. In 2007 data centers accounted for about 2 TWh per year, while office and home computers accounted for 16 TWh per year. Further, 21% of PCs used at work are never switched off, contributing to wastage of about 1.5 TWh per year. Of the variety of reasons for the computers not being turned off, P2P applications such as BitTorrent play a vital role. Recent studies report that 40 to 73% of the internet traffic is P2P and BitTorent is the most popular p2p protocol. Users are always in the quest for “which bittorrent program is the best”.  Based on these statistics, the group of researchers focus on a proxy based architecture for BitTorrent.