Analyzing the topology characteristics of P2P overlay networks for QoE evaluation

Nowadays Internet has become a gigantic and ubiquitous medium of all types of information. In such a large-scale and highly dynamic environments, the peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies have been used to distribute, share, and access resources. More and more P2P applications emerge on Internet and become part of our network life. In P2P networks, overlay topology has significant effect on network performance as well as user experience. In this paper, the correlation of P2P overlay structure and quality of experience (QoE) is studied. Based on a large sample of flow data collected from operational network, we construct overlay topologies of four types of P2P application, i.e. BitTorrent, Thunder, UUSee and PPLive. By using complex network theory, structure properties of different P2P applications are analyzed from user's perspective, including reachability, PageRank distribution and connection maintenance capability. Analysis results show the correlation between overlay topology properties and QoE, and can help us better understand the P2P systems and architectures for network optimization and service provision.