Towards peer-to-peer traffic analysis using flows

Abstract

One of the main problems with today's Internet traffic analysis is caused by the large number of network-based applications whose types and traffic patterns are more complicated than in the past. Today, peer-to-peer (P2P), streaming media, and game traffic are continuously increasing. The difficulty the traffic analysis is that this newly emerging traffic is not as simple as past well-known port based traffic. This paper focuses on analyzing P2P traffic, which is the most complicated traffic among newly emerging Internet traffic. We describe the properties of P2P traffic and explain why P2P traffic analysis is more difficult than other types of Internet traffic analysis. Next, we propose a new algorithm suitable for P2P traffic analysis. The main idea of our algorithm is that flow grouping based on their relationships will increase the accuracy of P2P traffic analysis. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003.