A measurement study of shared content on peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic has increased rapidly over the past few years, with file sharing providing the main drive behind such traffic. In this work we investigate the characteristics of files being shared over the popular eDonkey2000 (ED2K) P2P file sharing system. The shared files are categorized into audio, video and CD images, and the statistics of each one of these categories is studied. We look into the shared file formats and investigate their file size distributions. We verify the popularity of .mp3, .avi and .iso file formats in the shared audio, video and CD image content, respectively, and finally, we model the file size distribution of .mp3 files using the Pearson IV density function.