Crawling the eDonkey Network

In this paper we introduce an active-probing approach that measures the eDonkey (eDonkey 2000) network by us- ing an experimental client developed for this purpose. Our approach collects information from the eDonkey network by issuing queries for files. Based on this technique, we present our experiment and the results that evaluate the ca- pacity of the eDonkey network and characterize the distri- bution of servers, clients, and files, considering within the English/Chinese context when applicable.