User behavior modeling in peer-to-peer file sharing networks: Dissecting download and removal actions

User behavior models are important for building realistic simulation environment for research on P2P multimedia file-sharing systems. In this paper, we build a user download behavior model and a user removal behavior model, which can describe important user characteristics that are not captured in the existing models. The proposed download behavior model incorporates retry behavior, and the removal behavior model integrates free-riding, file usage, and file removal. Based on two-year real user logs, we derive the range of all the model parameters and generate many interesting observations. To validate the proposed models, we compare several models in a case study on the number of living replicas in P2P file-sharing systems. The results demonstrate the accuracy, usability, and advantage of the proposed models.