Traffic Modeling and Proportional Partial Caching for Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems generate a major portion of the Internet traffic, and this portion is expected to increase in the future. We explore the potential of deploying proxy caches in different autonomous systems (ASes) with the goal of reducing the cost incurred by Internet service providers and alleviating the load on the Internet backbone. We conduct an eight-month measurement study to analyze the P2P traffic characteristics that are relevant to caching, such as object popularity, popularity dynamics, and object size. Our study shows that the popularity of P2P objects can be modeled by a Mandelbrot-Zipf distribution, and that several workloads exist in P2P traffic. Guided by our findings, we develop a novel caching algorithm for P2P traffic that is based on object segmentation, and proportional partial admission and eviction of objects. Our trace-based simulations show that with a relatively small cache size, a byte hit rate of up to 35% can be achieved by our algorithm, which is close to the byte hit rate achieved by an off-line optimal algorithm with complete knowledge of future requests. Our results also show that our algorithm achieves a byte hit rate that is at least 40% more, and at most triple, the byte hit rate of the common Web caching algorithms. Furthermore, our algorithm is robust in face of aborted downloads, which is a common case in P2P systems.