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This publication was typeset using LATEX. To my parents “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”- Socrates (469–399 BC)-Wide availability of computing resources at the edge of the network has lead to the appearance of new services based on peer-to-peer architectures. In a peer-to-peer network nodes have the capability to act both as client and server. They self-organize and cooperate with each other to perform more efficiently operations related to peer discovery, content search and content distribution. The main goal of this thesis is to obtain a better understanding of the network traffic generated by Gnutella peers. Gnutella is a well-known, heavily decentralized file-sharing peer-to-peer network. It is based on open protocol specifications for peer signaling, which enable detailed measurements and analysis down to individual messages. File transfers are performed using HTTP. An 11-days long Gnutella link-layer packet trace collected at BTH is systematicall