Towards an ISP-compliant, peer-friendly design for peer-to-peer networks

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications are consuming a significant fraction of the total bandwidth of Internet service providers (ISPs). This has become a financial burden to ISPs and if not well addressed may lead ISPs to block or put strict rate limits on P2P traffic. In this paper, we propose a new framework, PCP, for designing P2P applications to smoothly fit into the global Internet. In our framework, an ISP decides on how much of its bandwidth is to be allocated to P2P clients, and P2P clients inside the network adopt a peer-friendly algorithm to fairly share the bandwidth. Using the widely-used percentile-based charging model and real traffic traces, we show that an ISP can allocate a large amount of bandwidth dedicated to P2P, without increasing its financial cost. We also show that P2P clients can use the algorithm to fairly share the allocated bandwidth. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.