Conference Minutes

Conference: Informatik 2004
Workshop: Algorithms and Protocols for Efficient Peer-to-Peer Applications
Talk: Managing Internet platforms wit predominant P2P traffic
Presenter: Gerhard HaÃ?linger, Deutsche Telekom, T-Systems, Darmstadt/Germany

– 50-80% of traffic is caused by peer-to-peer data exchange, 5-20% account to HTTP access (peek values occure during day, low values during night).
– On Slyck, statistics about file-sharing protocols in use can be found.
– eDonkey protocol is dominating in Germany (>80%), U.S.: FastTrack (>70%)
– Caches for P2P traffic are problematic due to techical reasons, but also due to copyright problems with data in the cache. A participant pointed out that actually every cachy can potentially contain illegal data, it’s just that concerning p2p, the assumption is always that it transfers illegal data per se.
– Portions of P2P traffic in the access regions are larger then in the backbones and even smaller on international links
– P2P traffic characteristics over time is favourable for ISPs due to the smoothing effect on the daily traffic profile (e.g. video transfer of several Gbyte may last for days). But those characteristics make the increase in traffic volumen hardly predictable with high risk for planning & extension process in internet provider networks