Controlling P2P File-Sharing Networks’ Traffic

Abstract

Since the appearance of Peer-To-Peer file-sharing networks some time ago, many Internet users have chosen this technology to share and search programs, videos, music, documents, etc. The total number of Peer-To-Peer file-sharing users has been increasing and decreasing in the last decade depending on the creation or end of some well known P2P file-sharing systems. P2P file-sharing networks traffic is currently overloading some data networks and it is a major headache for network administrators because it is difficult to control this kind of traffic (mainly because some P2P file-sharing networks encrypt their messages). This article deals with the analysis, taxonomy and characterization of eight Public P2P file-sharing networks: Gnutella, Freeenet, FastTrack, BitTorrent, Opennap, Edonkey, MP2P and Soulseek. These eight most popular networks have been selected due to their different type of working architecture. Then, we will show the amount of users, files and the size of files inside these file-sharing networks. Finally, several network configurations are presented in order to control Peer-to-Peer file-sharing traffic in the network.