Recent reports in the popular media suggest a significant decrease in
peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing traffic, attributed to the public's
response to legal threats. Have we reached the end of the P2P
revolution? In pursuit of legitimate data to verify this hypothesis, we
embark on a more accurate measurement effort of P2P traffic at the link
level. In contrast to previous efforts we introduce two novel elements
in our methodology. First, we measure traffic of all known popular P2P
protocols. Second, we go beyond the "known port" limitation by reverse
engineering the protocols and identifying characteristic strings in the
payload. We find that, if measured accurately, P2P traffic has never
declined; indeed we have never seen the proportion of p2p traffic
decrease over time (any change is an increase) in any of our data
sources.
An interesting report:
http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2004/p2p-dying/
Received on Mon Nov 1 03:14:06 2004