A Simple, Efficient and Flexible Approach to Measure Multi-protocol Peer-to-Peer Traffic

Applications based on peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols have become tremendously popular over the last few years, now accounting for a significant share of the total network traffic. To avoid restrictions imposed by network administrators for various reasons, the protocols used have become more sophisticated and employ various techniques to avoid detection and recognition with standard measurement tools. In this paper, we describe a measurement approach based on application level signatures, which reliably detects and measures P2P traffic for these protocols and which is also easily adaptable to the new P2P protocols that now frequently appear. A presentation of the results from a successful field test in a large university network indicates that this approach is not only accurate, but also provides the performance and scalability required for practical applications.