What can P2P do for traffic control in P2P networks?

Abstract

Recently, an ISP-driven cooperative approach is proposed to empowering ISPs for controlling traffic generated by P2P applications [?]. In this approach, an ISP and peers running a P2P application have a cooperative relationship where the ISP provides a guidance, i.e., network information to peers so that the peers select neighbors according to the guidance. This approach enables each party to gain better control and performance, e.g., ISPs gain a control over the P2P traffic, and peers accelerate the performance of the P2P application. However, we observe that the existing approach defines unilateral interaction where only ISPs strive to tackle traffic control and guide the peers that in turn just follow the guidance given by the ISPs, even though the peers could actively help collect network information and refine the guidance. The incentives for the peers to participate in this scheme is that they will also benefit on their part in reducing the download completion time as shown in the existing work [?]. In the light of this observation, we propose bilateral cooperation between ISPs and peers to bring more benefit to both parties, where not only ISPs but also the peers actively provide information so that ISPs can issue a better guidance for the peers than in the existing unilateral interaction model. In more detail, we divide measurement work into two parts so as to collect the network information efficiently and also introduce the guidance including traffic bound which is missing from the existing work. Through simulations we show our proposal brings more benefit to both ISPs and peers than the existing approach such as P4P [?].