LiteLoad: Content unaware routing for localizing P2P protocols

Abstract

In today's extensive worldwide Internet traffic, some 60% of network congestion is caused by Peer to Peer sessions. Consequently ISPs are facing many challenges like: paying for the added traffic requirement, poor customer satisfaction due to degraded broadband experience, purchasing costly backbone links and upstream bandwidth and having difficulty to effectively control P2P traffic with conventional devices. Existing solutions such as caching and indexing of P2P content are controversial as their legality is uncertain due to copyright violation, and therefore hardly being installed by ISPs. In addition these solutions are not capable to handle existing encrypted protocols that are on the rise in popular P2P networks. Other solutions that employ traffic shaping and blocking degrade the downloading throughput and cause end users to switch ISPs for a better service. LiteLoad discerns patterns of user communications in Peer to Peer file sharing networks without identifying the content being requested or transferred and uses least-cost routing rules to push peer-to-peer transfers into confined network segments. This approach maintains the performance of file transfer as opposed to traffic shaping solutions and precludes internet provider involvement in caching, cataloguing or indexing of the shared content. Simulation results expresses the potential of the solution and a proof of concept of the key technology is demonstrated on popular protocols, including encrypted ones.