Application Layer Peer-to-Peer Protocol Analysis: A Statistical Method for Analyzing P2P Protocols

Simulation is one of the most important techniquesfor analysis and improvement of technical systems.The reduction to the most important characteristicsminimizes the complexity and points out thefundamental attributes. Especially in the area of thecommunication networks, the simulation is anindespensable method. In the last few years thePeer-to-Peer (P2P) network protocols play animportant role in the network analysis andsimulation. Among them, eMule/eDonkey is one of themost important representatives in Europe and hence isan interesting target for investigation.The author Björn Schmitt presents a method for theanalysis of such highly complex protocols. These arethe prefix-analysis and the derived macro-analysis.The difficulties and feasibilities are shown and theapproach is applied to the eMule/eDonkey protocol.This is building the base for modeling and simulatingthis type of network traffic.

Björn Schmitt, graduated in computer science atJulius-Maximilians-University in Würzburg, specializing indistributed systems and software engineering. Today, he isworking in software engineering projects focusing on qualityensurance in medical software development.