Peer-to-peer traffic measurement, analysis and management in an institutional network

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications are drastically changing the role of the Internet service providers (ISP) and institutional networks. This key reason is an unexpected and indiscriminate network bandwidth use that breaks the balance between costs and benefits. In addition, legal issues must be considered due to piracy associated with P2P applications. P2P effects are especially harmful in corporate, institutional and government networks that do not want to assume the responsibility to carry this type of data traffic. This paper presents an extensive analysis of eDonkey protocol that is one of the most popular P2P protocols. The analysis is focused on studying those important characteristics that allow understanding its behavior. A methodology to identify efficiently the associated TCP flows is also proposed. As a result, a mechanism based on spoofing TCP reset packets is tested to mitigate the eDonkey traffic effects and alleviate the network load.