PBoT: An analytical model of P2P traffic based on transactions

Nowadays Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing has not only become the dominant source of traffic in the Internet but also an increasingly common way of distributing contents commercially over IP networks, revealing the need of reaching a level of understanding of the behaviour and performance of the different P2P applications similar to that already achieved for other Internet services such as web browsing. This paper contributes to fulfil this task by introducing a simple analytical model that enables the study of P2P file-sharing systems in terms of performance, global behaviour, and the impact of their traffic on the networks. This paper also presents simulation results that will show the accuracy of the presented analytical model and will provide some practical insights on the behaviour of P2P systems, which can be of interest for P2P application designers and network engineers.