Socio-technical issues in P2P file sharing systems
D. R. Hughes, James Walkerdine, K. Lee · 2007
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems emphasise co-operation between entities known as peers at the edge of the Internet that are essentially equal and can both require and provide services [1]. Since the release of Napster in 1999, Peer-to-Peer file-sharing has enjoyed a dramatic rise in popularity. As early as 2000, a study by Plonka [2] on the University of Wisconsin campus network found that file-sharing accounted for a comparable volume of traffic to web applications, while a 2002 study by Saroiu et al. [3] on the University of Washington campus network found that file-sharing accounted for more than treble the volume of web traffic observed. Today it is widely accepted that P2P file sharing is responsible for more internet traffic than any other application, though the migration of users to more anonymous systems, together with the proliferation of P2P file sharing protocols makes exact measurements difficult [4]. As might be expected given the significance of P2P systems to the modern Internet, a number of large-scale studies of P2P traffic such as [2] [3] and [4] have been performed. These studies typically use a classical network monitoring approach and tend to focus upon the low level properties of deployed P2P systems such as bandwidth consumption, file availability and so on. We argue that existing studies neglect the social aspects of P2P file sharing systems and that empirical evidence shows that socio-technical issues are critically important on such systems. This