Locality-aware P2P query search with ISP collaboration

More than half of Internet traffic today is contributed by peerto-peer (P2P) systems. Yet P2P systems build their overlay topology largely agnostic of the Internet underlay, which often leads to traffic management challenges for Internet Service Providers (ISP) and potentially inefficient neighbourhood selection for P2P nodes. To overcome this, we propose to use an oracle hosted by the ISPs, so that ISPs and P2P users can cooperate for improved performance. The oracle can be queried by P2P nodes while choosing neighbours for content search, and it will rank the possible neighbours of the querying node according to a locality indication, like location within the same AS, or the AS-hop distance. The ISP gains by keeping traffic within its Autonomous System (AS), and the P2P node can experience improved performance like lesser delay and better bandwidth. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits of our scheme by performing experiments in a real Testlab as well as a simulation framework. We show how we configure representative AS topologies for P2P networks, and present experimental results with content search phase of a P2P network using different file sharing and search query distributions. 1. Motivation. A significant portion of the Internet traffic today is contributed by P2P systems, which are realized as overlays on top of the underlying Internet routing architecture. Some of the most popular applications that rely on the P2P methodology [10] include file sharing systems like Bittorrent, Gnutella and eDonkey, VoIP systems such as GoogleTalk and Skype, as well as real-time multimedia streaming and online gaming systems. Recent measurement studies have reported that P2P systems account for more than 50% of total Internet traffic [18, 19, 10]. Indeed, P2P system applications are one of the major reasons cited by users for upgrading their Internet access to broadband [15]. Yet, P2P traffic also poses a problem for the ISPs as it is very dominant and the traffic flows are almost impossible to engineer [18, 19]. This is primarily because ISPs have neither control nor knowledge of the overlay structure of P2P systems, which is formed largely independent of the Internet routing underlay. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary: 68M10, 68M14; Secondary: 90B18.