Traffic Measurement between Peers in BitTorrent-Like Networks

Our understanding for the traffic behaviors on P2P networks is, unfortunately, still incomplete in the sense that the current studies on traffic measurement primarily focus on the traffic in large, and insufficient efforts have been devoted to the investigation of the inter-peer traffic. Toward resolving this issue, we in this paper propose and implement a method for measuring the traffic between any individual peers. Through deploying this measurement method on the PlanetLab platform, traffic data are collected and analyzed in the following aspects: data correctness, Poisson property, traffic self-similarity of individual peers, and traffic self-similarity of the BT system. Results of these analyses suggest that the proposed method is feasible, effective, and can be extended to larger networks.