P2P Traffic Identification Based on Host and Flow Behaviour Characteristics

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been widely applied in file sharing, streaming media, instant messaging and other fields, which have attracted large attention. At the same time P2P networks traffic worsens the congestion of a network significantly. In order to better manage and control P2P traffic, it is important to identify P2P traffic accurately. In this paper we propose a novel P2P identification scheme, based on the host and flow behaviour characteristics of P2P traffic. First we determine if a host takes part in a P2P application by matching its behaviour with some predefined host level behaviour rules. Subsequently, we refine the identification by comparing the statistical features of each flow in the host with several flow feature profiles. The experiments on real world network data prove that this method is quite efficient to identify P2P traffic. The classification accuracy achieves 93.9 % and 96.3 % in terms of flows and bytes respectively.