Peer-Level Analysis of Distributed Multimedia Content Sharing

In the last few years, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications have become very popular: more users are continuously joining such systems and more objects are being made available, seducing even more users to join. Today, the traffic generated by P2P systems accounts for a major fraction of the Internet traffic and is bound to increase. P2P networks are currently evolving towards a real time multimedia content distribution able to provide reliable IPTV and Video on Demand (VoD) services. These new services create several challenges, the most important one being how to efficiently share resources in an heterogeneous, dynamic and continuously evolving group of peers. A detailed peer-level characterization is therefore fundamental for the technical and marketing design, deployment and management of these new services. This paper will be focused on the characterization of BitTorrent as one of the most important P2P applications and, from that analysis, will try to extrapolate the main characteristics and behaviours of the potential P2P real-time multimedia content distribution clients. Specifically, the paper analyses the geographical localization of the involved peers, the peers' availability and the Round Trip Time (RTT) between peers as a function of the time and for different categories of shared files.