On Characterizing Peer-to-Peer Streaming Traffic

Extensive studies have shown that the peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic has already become the dominant traffic in the current Internet. The current P2P streaming user base is still undergoing stunning growth in China although its user scale already reached 158 million in 2010, 68% of Chinese web users. Hence, a comprehensive understanding of the P2P streaming network traffic characterization is essential to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in terms of network planning and resource allocation. In this paper, based on the massive data collected with a passive network monitoring equipment placed in the Internet backbone, we provide an in-depth view of the current P2P streaming traffic in the current Internet of China. In particular, we statistically study the P2P streaming traffic in both wired (ADSL in this paper) and wireless (CDMA) networks, and characterize the traffic from both flow-level and packet-level aspects. Our study uncovers the significant impact of the P2P streaming traffic on the underlying network due to its unique characteristics and the bandwidth intensive nature of the corresponding applications. In addition, the result reveals the significant difference between the characterizations of the P2P streaming traffic in wired and wireless networks due to their respective intrinsic environmental characteristics.