Practical network traffic analysis in P2P environment

Recent statistical studies on telecommunication networks outline that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing is keeping increasing and it now contributes about 50–80% of the overall Internet traffic [1]. Moreover, more and more network applications such as streaming media, internet telephony, and instant messaging are taking a form of P2P telecommunication. The bandwidth intensive nature of P2P applications suggests that P2P traffic can have significant impact on the underlying network. Therefore, analyzing and characterizing this kind of traffic is an essential step to develop workload models towards efficient amelioration in network traffic engineering and capacity planning. In this paper, we first introduce an adaptive system for handy P2P trace capturing and analysis. By using virtualization technology, the system can efficiently organize limited resources to build a reliable and tractable network that supports adjustable experimental study and practical performance tuning. Then the proposed system is applied to traffic characterization of File Sharing P2P (FSP2P) applications. To avoid excessive computing cost of payload information inspection, we proposed a more light-weighted analytical scheme which makes use of meta features extracted from packet headers. With carefully selected system parameters, we show that satisfactory prediction accuracy on differentiating FSP2P applications from ordinary network applications could be achieved with acceptable computing costs. The proposed scheme supports performance tuning between monitoring cost and the system response time, which enables its adaption to network environments with different specifications.