Although several fully decentralized peer-to-peer systems have been proposed in the literature, most existing systems still employ a centralized architecture. In order to compare these two paradigms, as a case study, we conduct measurements in the eDonkey and the Kad network—two of the most popular peer-to-peer systems in use today. We reengineered the eDonkey server software and integrated two modified servers into the eDonkey network in order to monitor traffic. Additionally, we implemented a Kad client exploiting a design weakness to spy on the traffic at arbitrary locations in the ID space. The goal of this study is to provide insight into the spacial and temporal distributions of the peers’ activities and also examine the searched contents. Finally, we discuss problems related to the collection of such data sets and investigate techniques to verify the representativeness of the measured data.

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