%O Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing, held in Naples (Italy), February 7-9, 2007 %B Proceedings of the 15th EUROMICRO International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing, 2007. PDP '07 %L eprints2563 %X In this paper we propose a Markovian model of BitTorrent. Unlike already developed works which capture demographic dynamics, it focuses on the behavior of individual peers. To this end, we center our attention on a generic peer, called tagged peer (TP); for each possible logical state of a BT peer-to-peer connection maintained by the TP, we consider a stochastic process which counts the number of such links, and characterize them according to their state. Validation is carried out and steady-state analysis is performed in order to illustrate how performance evaluation can be extracted from our model %I IEEE %K Analytical models; Demography; Internet; Peer to peer computing; Performance analysis; Performance evaluation; Protocols; Sensitivity analysis; Steady-state; Stochastic processes %D 2007 %A Mario Barbera %A Alfio Lombardo %A Giovanni Schembra %A Mirco Tribastone %T An analytical model of a BitTorrent peer %R 10.1109/PDP.2007.19 %P 482-489