Impact of P2P traffic on IP communication networks’ performances

Over recent years there has been a large increase in the use of P2P (peer- to-peer) applications around the world. These applications have become very popular today and there are a lot of new users every day. Increasing of P2P users has a very great impact on increasing P2P traffic in communications networks. In this paper we pay attention to measuring of P2P traffic, by analyzing and simulating these kinds of network traffic. The estimated parameters of the measured traffic in analysis were used for modeling such traffic in a simulation tool, where we show how P2P traffic has an impact on IP communication networks’ performances. For this reason we built a test network in OPNET simulation tool where users, in addition to classical applications, also use P2P applications. We modeled the custom application which is based on the measurement of P2P traffic for a normal user.