Clustering in Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Workloads

Peer-to-peer file sharing systems now generate a significant portion of Internet tra#c. A good understanding of their workloads is crucial in order to improve their scalability, robustness and performance. Previous measurement studies on Kazaa and Gnutella were based on monitoring peer requests, and mostly concerned with peer and file availability and network tra#c. In this paper, we take di#erent measurements: instead of passively recording requests, we actively probe peers to get their cache contents information. This provides us with a map of contents, that we use to evaluate the degree of clustering in the system , and that could be exploited to improve significantly the search process