A dynamic peer-to-peer traffic limiting policy for ISP networks

As a scalable paradigm for content distribution at Internet-wide scale, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies have enabled a variety of networked services, such as distributed file-sharing and live video streaming. Most existing P2P systems employ nonintelligent peer selection algorithms for content swarming which greedily consume Internet bandwidth resources. As a result, Internet service providers (ISPs) need some efficient solutions for managing P2P traffic within their own networks. A common practice today is to block or shape P2P traffic in order to conserve bandwidth resources for carrying standard traffic from which revenue can be generated. In this paper, instead of looking at simple time-driven blocking/limiting approaches, we investigate how such types of limiting behaviors can be more gracefully performed by the ISP by taking into account the dynamics of both P2P traffic and of standard Internet traffic. Specifically, our approach is to adaptively limit excessive P2P traffic on critical network links that are prone to congestion, based on periodical link load/utilization measurements by the ISP. The ultimate objective is to guarantee non-P2P service capability while trying to accommodate as much P2P traffic as possible based on the available bandwidth resources. This approach can be regarded as a complementary solution to the recently proposed collaboration-based P2P paradigms such as P4P. Simulation results show that our approach not only eliminates performance degradation of non-P2P services that are caused by overwhelming P2P traffic, but also accommodates P2P traffic efficiently in both existing and future collaboration-based P2P network scenarios.