CUFTI: Methods for core users finding and traffic identification in P2P systems

Peer-to-Peer system has achieved great success with millions of end users in the past several years. P2P traffic has occupied about 60–80 % of the total traffic volumes, which greatly consumes network bandwidth and causes congestions. To achieve the goal of efficacious P2P system management in the monitored network, in this paper we develop a framework named CUFTI (Core Users Finding and Traffic Identification). The core users are referred as long-lived peers, and we focus on life-time characteristics of coexisting peers within each snapshot of the overlay. Based on the analysis results of user’s behaviour in PPlive system, we develop an accurate model to forecast the peer’s residual life-time and identify the long-lived peers. Furthermore, we develop a flow identification model for P2P traffic management of those core users. Based on the analysis results of actual traffic traces, we find the P2P traffic flows are composed of data and control packets. Most of the control packets appear at the beginning and end of each flow to establish and close the communication between peers. We employ the direction and payload length of the control packets at the beginning of the flow as features to perform flow identification. Experimental results based on traces collected from the Northwest Region Center of CERNET (China Education and Research Network) show that the newly developed methods outperforms other existing methods with lower false negative rate (FNR) and false positive rate (FPR).