The popularity of peer-to-peer multimedia file sharing
applications such as Gnutella and Napster has created a flurry of recent research activity into peer-to-peer architectures.
We believe that the proper evaluation of a peer-to-peer
system must take into account the
characteristics of the peers that choose to participate.
Surprisingly, however, few of the peer-to-peer architectures currently
being developed are evaluated with respect to such considerations. We
believe that this is, in part, due to a lack of information about the
characteristics of hosts that choose to participate in the currently
popular peer-to-peer systems. In this paper, we remedy this situation
by performing a detailed measurement study of the two most popular
peer-to-peer file sharing systems, namely Napster and Gnutella. In
particular, our measurement study seeks to precisely characterize the
population of end-user hosts that participate in these two systems.
This characterization includes the bottleneck bandwidths between these
hosts and the Internet at large, IP-level latencies to send packets to
these hosts, how often hosts connect and disconnect from the system,
how many files hosts share and download, the degree of cooperation
between the hosts, and several correlations between these
characteristics. Our measurements show that there is significant
heterogeneity and lack of cooperation across peers participating in
these systems.
