A Methodology for P2P Traffic Measurement Using Application Signature

P2P application has become tremendously popular over the last few years, now accounting for a significant share of the total network traffic. P2P protocols used arbitrary ports to camouflage its traffic to avoid detection and recognition with standard measurement tools. This paper presents a measurement system which reliably detects and measures P2P traffic in real-time. The methodology is based on using application level signatures implemented by Netfilter extension as well as packet classifier. The results from test in a large university network indicate that this approach not only can significantly improve the P2P traffic volume estimates but also provided the performance required for practical applications.