A Detailed Measurement of Skype Network Traffic

The last few years witnessed Peer-2-Peer (P2P) and VoIP telephony gaining a tremendous popularity: Skype is beyond doubt the most amazing example of this new phenomenon, as its 170 millions users testify. In this paper, the authors propose a detailed measurement of Skype sources: they adopt a twofold methodology, using active experiments and passive measurement to gain knowledge about the traffic Skype generates, in a controlled and realistic environment, respectively. The analysis considers both signaling traffic as well as voice calls. Furthermore, they address the description of Skype sources at both packet- and flow-levels: they describe fine-grained dynamics of the interaction between Skype and the network, as well as provide a macroscopic characterization of Skype traffic.