Traffic Measurements of P2P Systems

Abstract

The paper reports on a measurement infrastructure developed at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BIT) with the purpose to do traffic measurements and analysis on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic. The measurement methodology is based on using application logging as well as link-layer packet capture. This offers the possibility to measure application layer information with link-layer accuracy. Details are reported on this methodology, together with description of the BIT measurement infrastructure. The paper also reports on traffic measurements done on BitTorrent and Gnutella protocols from an endclient perspective, together with some measurement results of salient protocol characteristics. Preliminary results show a high degree of variability of the BitTorrent and Gnutella traffic, where in the case of Gnutella a large contribution is given by the signaling traffic.