Measurements on movie distribution behaviour in peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mode dominates the way that files are shared over the Internet today. A measurement study on the user behaviour during the P2P file sharing is important and helpful to better understand and design P2P networks. In this study, the authors developed a method to collect information about peers and connections in movie sharing at the BitTorrent client side. Movie is selected as the investigation object since its immense popularity and large size among all the file types over P2P networks. The method proposed in this study can be easily applied to study the distribution behaviour of other types of files. Based on the collected data, the authors have derived 10 observations in three categories: (i) distributions of peers and connections over globe time and local time (after adjustment of time differences); (ii) distributions of peers and connections over geographic areas (at different levels of continents, countries, cities); and (iii) the influence to the above distributions by differences of population, gross domestic product (GDP) and life style.