Is P2P dying or just hiding?

Abstract

Abstract-Recent reports in the popular media suggest a significant decrease in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing traffic, attributed to the public's response to legal threats. Have we reached the end of the P2P revolution? In pursuit of legitimate data to verify this hypothesis, we embark on a more accurate measurement effort of P2P traffic at the link level. In contrast to previous efforts we introduce two novel elements in our methodology. First, we measure traffic of all known popular P2P protocols. Second, we go beyond the "known port" limitation by reverse engineering the protocols and identifying characteristic strings in the payload. We find that, if measured accurately, P2P traffic has never declined; indeed we have never seen the proportion of p2p traffic decrease over time (any change is an increase) in any of our data sources.

Correlating Topology and Path Characteristics of Overlay Networks and the Internet

“…The break-down of traffic per TCP port shows that, contrary to reported traffic analysis results from 2004 [16], there is a wide amount of hidden traffic on non-standard ports. These results confirm the initial findings of [7], and corroborate them with quantitative data. We complete our traffic analysis with a detailed break-down of the application-level bandwidth.…”

“…Figure 2 shows the CDF of the number of users and users' weights per IO. As expected, 7 MaxMind, http://www.maxmind.com 8 WebLog Expert, http://www.weblogexpert.com there is no dominant IO; notably, the top 500 Internet organizations cover less than 90% in both categories. This shows that BitTorrrent has grown to a large-scale, completely distributed state, in which both users and their traffic are scattered around the world.…”

“…These efforts are not targeting any specific application; our BitTorrent study can offer additional insight into the actual use of the Internet, for instance by uncovering the peers' download bandwidth (a comprehensive survey on the difficulties of accurately measuring the bandwidth available to and consumed by Internet applications is given in [18]), or by showing strong evidence that the P2P traffic of BitTorrent has shifted to non-default ports (answering the 2004 CAIDA question Is P2P dying or just hiding? [7] for the BitTorrent network).…”

“…Large P2P networks continuously have more than 1,000,000 users 1 , and P2P file-sharing networks account now for more than one third of the total Internet traffic [7,12]. Over the past couple of years, BitTorrent has become the largest P2P file-sharing network in terms of generated traffic [12].…”

Controlling False Alarm/Discovery Rates in Online Internet Traffic Flow Classification

“…To provide a better overall level of service, ISPs can decide, based on their classification results, to prioritize time-sensitive flows (VoIP, video-conferencing, etc.) and to throttle bandwidth-intensive applications like Peer-to-Peer file sharing, which are known to consume a large portion of the network's resources [1] and therefore degrade the overall performance for everyone on the network. The classification results can also be used for network security and network provisioning.…”