Benchmarking P2P Applications

We intend to propose a set of performance metrics to evaluate a peer to peer (P2P) file sharing system. P2P file sharing systems are increasingly becoming popular in the internet community for efficient and easy sharing of files among users. A group of people have to choose from several commercially available P2P clients to share their files. The available P2P networks cater to a specific type of files like multimedia or research papers etc. We propose a set of benchmarks which can be used by a group of people to evaluate a P2P system based on their specific requirements. Using these benchmarks one can characterize the performance of any P2P based system and compare different available alternatives. We present a methodology to use these benchmarks to evaluate and compare the alternatives. Based on the user requirements, we also propose a methodology to create an input suite which can be used to measure these proposed metrics. As an example we use our benchmarks to evaluate and compare two popular P2P based file sharing systems.