Abstract--The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications is growing dranlaticaliy, particularly for sharing large video/audio files and software. In this paper, we analyze P2P traffic by measuring flow-level information collected at multiple border routers across a late ISP network, and report our investigation of three popular P2P systems -FastTrack, Gnutella, and DirectConnect. We characterize the P2P traffic observed at a single ISP and its impact on the underlying network. We observe very skewed distribution in the traffic across the network at different levels of spatial aggregation (IP, prefix, AS). All three P2P systems exhibit significant dynamics at short times scale and particularly at the IP address level Still, the fraction of P2P traffic contributed by each prefix is much more stable than the corresponding distribution of either Web traffic or overall traffic. The high volume and good stability properties of P2P traffic indicates that the P2P workload is a good candidate for being managed via application-specific layer-3 traffic engineering in an ISP's network.
In REF a systematic characterization of P2P traffic and its impact on the underlying network is performed; a novel approach for conducting large scale measurements of P2P traffic for collecting data from multiple routers in a large ISP is presented.
Analyzing peer-to-peer traffic across large networks
IMW '02
Computer Science