Comparison of Bittorrent packet traffic characteristics over IPv6 and IPv4

Abstract

Nowadays, BitTorrent packets constitutes a large part of peer-to-peer application traffic on the Internet. Due to increasing size of BitTorrent traffic, it becomes inevitable to take into account the effects of it in network management. Generally, studies relevant with Bittorrent traffic measurement have performed analysis with packets transmitted via IPv4 protocol. However, provided many facilities for IPv6 internet connection, its traffic volume in operational networks is increasing day by day. In IPv6 protocol, addressing strategy and most of the fields in packet header are totally changed. How these changes affect the characteristics of the Internet traffic should be understood firmly for efficient resource sharing in networks. In this study, we investigate the Bittorrent packet traffic characteristics in terms of autocorrelation, power spectral density and self similarity of packet size and packet interarrival time. We also performed a detailed comparison between IPv4 and IPv6 BitTorrent packet traffic.