Measurement and Analysis of Gnutella Signaling Traffic

The paper reports on in-depth measurements and analysis of Gnutella signaling traffic collected at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BIT), Karlskrona, Sweden. The measurements are based on a week-long packet trace collected with help of the well-known tcpdump application. Furthermore, a novel approach has been used to measure and analyze Gnutella signaling traffic. Associated with this, a dedicated tcptrace module has been developed and used to decode the packet trace, down to individual Gnutella messages. The measurement infrastructure consists of a Gnutella node running in ultrapeer mode and protocol decoding software. Detailed traffic characteristics have been collected and analyzed, such as session durations and interarrival times, and Gnutella message sizes and duration. Preliminary results show a high degree of variability of the Gnutella signaling traffic, which is mostly created by the QUERY messages. Furthermore, the Gnutella session interarrival times are observed to resemble the exponential distribution.