Measurement Based Modeling of eDonkey Peer-to-Peer File Sharing System

We analyze in this paper eDonkey traffic on the basis of measurements from the France Telecom IP collect network. Specifically, we investigate the structure of the eDonkey network by analyzing addresses and port numbers involved in eDonkey transactions. This analysis allows us to understand the dynamics of eDonkey traffic in a subnetwork of the whole eDonkey network. In particular, we stress the fact that eDonkey gives rise to a huge amount of signaling, identified as small TCP data transfers. To qualitatively explain the observed phenomena, we develop a very simple qualitative model to understand the dynamics of an eDonkey community sharing a given object (a chunk or a file). This model is intended to capture the transient behavior of a network relying on eDonkey principles when sharing an object. This simple model allows us to identify two regimes depending on the congestion level of servers (expansion and collapse).