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Characterizing files in the modern Gnutella network

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Abstract

The Internet has witnessed an explosive increase in the popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing applications during the past few years. As these applications become more popular, it becomes increasingly important to characterize their behavior in order to improve their performance and quantify their impact on the network. In this paper, we present a measurement study on characteristics of available files in the modern Gnutella system. We develop two new methodologies to capture accurate snapshots of available files in a large-scale P2P system. These methodologies were implemented in a parallel crawler that captures the entire overlay topology of the system where each peer in the overlay is annotated with its available files. We have captured more than 50 snapshots of the Gnutella system that span over 1 year period. Using these snapshots, we conduct three types of analysis on available files: (1) Static analysis, (2) Topological analysis, and (3) dynamic analysis. Our results reveal several interesting properties of available files in Gnutella that can be leveraged to improve the design and evaluation of P2P file-sharing applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Daniel Stutzbach, Shanyu Zhao & Reza Rejaie

Authors
  1. Daniel Stutzbach
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  2. Shanyu Zhao
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  3. Reza Rejaie
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Reza Rejaie.

Additional information

This paper extends and supplants the earlier version of this paper presented at MMCN 2006 [1]. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. Nets-NBD-0627202, CAREER Award CNS-0448639, and an unrestricted gift from Cisco Systems. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or Cisco.

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Stutzbach, D., Zhao, S. & Rejaie, R. Characterizing files in the modern Gnutella network. Multimedia Systems 13, 35–50 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-007-0079-8

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