Analysis and Characterization of Peer-To-Peer Filesharing Networks

Abstract: Since Peer-To-Peer file-sharing networks appearance a few years ago, many Internet users have chosen this technology to search for programs, films, songs, documents, etc. This number of users is growing every day. The main reason has been the content (in occasions illegal) that can be found and downloaded over these networks. This article deals with the analysis and characterization of eight P2P Public networks: Gnutella, FastTrack, Freeenet, BitTorrent, Opennap, Edonkey, Soulseek and MP2P. Finally, the authors will show a relationship between their characteristics and, in six of them, between their number of users, files shared and the amount of data shared in their network