P2P Traffic Identification using Cluster Analysis

In the last years, we have seen that the use of P2P applications has increased significantly and currently they represent a significant portion of the Internet traffic. In consequence of this growth, P2P traffic characterization and identification are becoming increasingly important for network administrators and designers. However, this identification is not simple. Nowadays, P2P applications explicitly try to camouflage the original traffic in an attempt to go undetected. This work presents a methodology and selection of five traffic discriminators and applies cluster analysis to identify P2P applications. Our results indicate that the accuracy is around 90% using this small number of discriminators.