Estimating P2P Traffic Volume at USC

With the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing applications there has been an increasing interest in understanding the popularity and use of P2P. In this study, we look at P2P use on the University of Southern California’s campus network throughout a 14-hour period. We quantify the volume of traffic from P2P activity as well as the number of campus hosts involved in P2P at USC. Since port-matching techniques often fail for P2P applications, we estimate traffic based on both port-based and connection-pattern based techniques. We do not have access to packet data and so these measures provide only bounds on P2P traffic. In addition, while we identify P2P sharing, we cannot comment the types of data being shared (either music or data, restricted or freely available). We find that 3–13% of active hosts on campus participate in P2P, and that this traffic accounts for 21–33% of the bytes transferred to and from our campus.

[1]  Carey L. Williamson,et al.  A Longitudinal Study of P2P Traffic Classification , 2006, 14th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation.

[2]  Michalis Faloutsos,et al.  BLINC: multilevel traffic classification in the dark , 2005, SIGCOMM '05.

[3]  C. Papadopoulos,et al.  Inherent Behaviors for On-line Detection of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing , 2007, 2007 IEEE Global Internet Symposium.

[4]  Daniel Stutzbach,et al.  On the Long-term Evolution of the Two-Tier Gnutella Overlay , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[5]  Michael K. Reiter,et al.  Finding Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Using Coarse Network Behaviors , 2006, ESORICS.

[6]  Michalis Faloutsos,et al.  Transport layer identification of P2P traffic , 2004, IMC '04.

[7]  Panayiotis Mavrommatis,et al.  Identifying Known and Unknown Peer-to-Peer Traffic , 2006, Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA'06).

[8]  Hiroshi Esaki,et al.  The impact and implications of the growth in residential user-to-user traffic , 2006, SIGCOMM.

[9]  B. Plattner,et al.  Flow-Based Identification of P2P Heavy-Hitters , 2006, International Conference on Internet Surveillance and Protection (ICISP’06).

[10]  Michalis Faloutsos,et al.  Is P2P dying or just hiding? [P2P traffic measurement] , 2004, IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2004. GLOBECOM '04..