Cache Replacement Policies For P2P File Sharing Protocols

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications generate a large part of today's Internet traffic. The large volume of this traffic (thus high potential caching benefits) and the large cache sizes required (thus nontrivial costs associated with caching) only underline that efficient cache replacement policies are important in this case. File popularity in P2P file-sharing networks does not follow Zipf’s law and several additional characteristics set the generated traffic apart from well-studied Web traffic. All these lead us to conduct a focused study of efficient cache management policies for P2P file-sharing traffic. This paper uses real-world traces and trace driven simulations to compare traditional cache replacement policies and new policies that exploit characteristics of the P2P file-sharing traffic generated by applications using FastTrack protocol. 1