Cache replacement policies for P2P file sharing protocols

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications generate a large part of today's Internet traffic. The large volume of this traffic (thus high potential caching benefits) and the large cache sizes required (thus non-trivial costs associated with caching) only underline that efficient cache replacement policies are important in this case. File popularity in P2P file-sharing networks does not follow Zipf's law and several additional characteristics set the generated traffic apart from well-studied Web traffic. All this lead us to conduct a focused study of efficient cache management policies for P2P file-sharing traffic. This paper uses real-world traces and trace driven simulations to compare traditional cache replacement policies and new policies that exploit characteristics of the P2P file-sharing traffic generated by applications using FastTrack protocol.