Project proposal
for
Network based P2P Flow Recognition
Network based P2P Recognition
A peer-to-peer (P2P) is any distributed network architecture composed of participants that make
a portion of their resources (such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth) directly
available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination instances (such as
servers or stable hosts). Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the
traditional client-server model where only servers supply, and clients consume. P2P applications have a
significant share in Internet traffic. Protocol wise distribution of P2P traffic is shown in the Fig below
[1].
Fig: P2P protocol distribution by volume, Germany 2007
In the current project, we will identify the P2P flows so that they can be treated by the downstream
routers as per policy. The entity performing P2P flow recognizer will be the part of ISP network and all
the traffic coming from customer’s edge and/or Internet will be dumped to that entity. Following
diagram will describe the proposed architecture.
In this diagram, copy of all the flows from the users and Internet will be forwarded to the P2P
flow recognizer. Upon the reception of a packet, the P2P application identification module will come
into act. It will identify that whether a particular packet belongs to a P2P flow or not. If a packet
corresponds to a P2P flow, it will instruct the marking and policing module to mark that packet as per
policy. All the packets will be passing offline through the proposed machine and it has to conduct
analysis instantly so that traffic flow can be treated as urgently as possible and the number of packets
passing through the network without policy will be minimized. Therefore we assume that this will be
an entity with higher memory resources and processing power.
Team:
1. Dr. Amir Qayyum
(Project Director)
2. Mr. Ehsan Elahi
(Project Coordinator)
3. Ms Sadaf Yasmin
(Research Engineer)
4. Mr. Yasir Majeed
(Developer)
5. Mr. Amer Zaheer
(Developer)
Molestones:
1. Identification of target applications
2. Comprehensive report on literature survey and analysis
3. Algorithm Development
4. Detailed design specification
5. Algorithm Implementation
6. Offline testing
7. Optimized architecture
8. Online deployment and testing
Deliverables:
1. Release of prototype
2. Initial test report
3. Optimized version release
4. Final test report
5. Final release
Timeline:
Starting date: January 1, 2010
End date: June 15, 2010
Tasks to be accomplished in January 2010:

Target application identification

Literature survey and analysis report

Implementation options and selection
Tasks to be accomplished in February 2010:

Algorithm development and optimization
Tasks to be accomplished in March 2010:

Implementation and prototype release
Tasks to be accomplished in April 2010:

Prototype testing and optimization
Tasks to be accomplished in May 2010:

Optimization of Architecture

Final testing

Final release

Release Document
Tasks to be accomplished in June 2010:

Deployment
Future Work:
It is a usual practice that sometimes government agency or ISP itself blocks a website from its
subscribers. It can be done by installing a firewall in the main stream of traffic coming from
subscribers. This can create a bottleneck point. Also this blockage is based upon the IP filtering. But if
on that IP address, there are some other web servers running for some legitimate websites, these
websites will also be blocked. Moreover if the government wants to block one specific page of a
website, not the whole site, then the ISP has no such facility to do that without Deep Packet Inspection
(DPI) techniques. For example ISP wants to block a video from the www.youtube.com, it has no other
option except to block the IP address of this site. We planned to extend this project to solve the above
mentioned problems by looking into the packets coming from the subscribers without intervening into
the main traffic stream. Through this idea, we let the subscriber’s request go outside the network but in
the meanwhile we recognize it and block the reply from the web server and also block the subsequent
requests from that subscriber.
References:
[1] “The absolute majority of all Internet traffic is p2p file-sharing” available online at
http://liquidculture.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/the-absolute-majority-of-all-internet-traffic-is-p2p-filesharing/