Detailed analysis of eDonkey transfers on ADSL

The large use of P2P systems gives rise to the question of the performance of these applications. The performance evaluation of P2P systems can be undertaken in many ways. Here, we focus mainly on file retrieval performance, i.e., the time to download a file, the throughput of downloads and the waiting time before the transfer begins. Our study is based on an ADSL concentration point with a large number of residential users. We analyze the TCP connections of eDonkey peers. Our measurement tool gives us the possibility to put together all the connections downloading the same file and thus, to study the general efficiency of file download. Our results indicate that the waiting time is important and independent of file popularity and that the average throughput is very low and has an unexpected dependence on file popularity. The performances vary significantly, such that on the one hand most of the transfers encounter low throughputs, and on the other hand some achieve very fast download rates.