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Estimating P2P Traffic Volume at USC

Genevieve Bartlett, John Heidemann, Christos Papadopoulos, and James Pepin
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

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.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Bartlett07c: Genevieve Bartlett, John Heidemann, Christos Papadopoulos, and James Pepin. Estimating P2P Traffic Volume at USC. Technical Report ISI-TR-2007-645, USC/Information Sciences Institute, June, 2007. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Bartlett07c.html>.

@techreport{Bartlett07c,
	author = "Genevieve Bartlett and John Heidemann and Christos
 Papadopoulos and James Pepin",
	title = "Estimating P2P Traffic Volume at USC",
	institution = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	year = "2007",
	number = "ISI-TR-2007-645",
	month = "June",
	keywords = "peer-to-peer traffic characterization, p2p",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Bartlett07c.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Bartlett07c.pdf",
	myorganization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	copyrightholder = "authors",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2007 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.