Typical Stakeholders

  • Network Operations
  • Sales & Marketing Teams
  • Senior Management
  • Strategic Management
  • Industry & Regulatory Bodies

Features & Benefits:

  • Provides detailed performance data and real-time information about P2P implementations
  • Characteristic P2P protocol simulation flows include Port-based, Pattern-based and Behavioural Simulations
  • Extensive library of predefined P2P traffic flows including:
    • BitTorrent
    • e-Donkey/e-Mule
    • Kontiki
    • Gnutella
  • Easy to install/configure new P2P signatures with immediate real-time results
  • Flexible and configurable - customers can choose what signatures they want to analyse and work with, and decide what is done with the data

Understanding Traffic Policies

Accurate knowledge of traffic management policies is desirable for several reasons, including traffic engineering and network capacity planning. ISP-I for P2P™ is the only technology solution in the market today to deliver P2P performance testing with definitive benchmarking and reporting for your own and competing Operators services. ISP-I for P2P™ combines advanced P2P data flow capabilities and a library of P2P signatures to accurately emulate P2P protocol behavior in the network.

ISP-I for P2P™ can be used to:

  • Determine the performance impact of traffic management on subscriber service delivery
  • Benchmark the performance of deep packet inspection (DPI) Vendor solutions
  • Validate the performance of QoS-aware mechanisms
  • Verify the heuristic classification methodologies of deep packet inspection (DPI) Vendor solutions

Current P2P identification technology
When it comes to identifying P2P users, currently there are a number of accepted choices: port based analysis, protocol analysis (DPI) & Traffic behavior. Whilst there is no "one size fits all" solution for P2P identification work - the following are currently the most important and commonly used techniques to identify and manage Peer-to-Peer communications.

Port-based analysis
Port-based analysis is is based on the concept that many P2P applications have default ports on which they function. When these applications are run, they use these ports to communicate with outside. To perform port based analysis, Operators observe the network traffic and check whether there are connection records using these ports. Port-based matching is very simple in practice, but its limitations are obvious as many P2P applications have evolved to use random ports.

Signature-based - Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)
With this approach, Operators monitor the Layer-7 packets passing through the network and inspect the data payload of the packets according to some previously defined signature. Signature-based matching requires new signatures to be introduced when these signatures changes and obfuscating workload characterization is also an increasing tendency of P2P protocols to support payload encryption.

Traffic Behavior
This approach is based on a heuristic-based analysis of the behavior of peers by studying connection characteristics of {IP, port} pairs. Typically peers keep using one or several TCP/UDP ports to make connections to fulfil initial control work. Additionally some P2P applications will make connections to fixed outside IP addresses to perform such functions as version checks, authentication & downloading bootstrap.



P2P
Fig 1. 1-week snapshot of single Operator's P2P policy with BitTorrent, Gnutella & HTTP traffic classes