Analyzing peer-to-peer traffic across large networks

Abstract

The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications is growing dramaticaliy, 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 large 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.