Cooperative traffic management for video streaming overlays

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) based overlays often ignore the boundaries of network domains and make traffic management challenging for network operators. Locality-aware techniques are a promising approach to alleviate this impact, but often benefit only network operators and fail to provide similar benefits to end-users and overlay providers. This is especially severe with video streaming overlays that are responsible for large amount of Internet traffic. In this paper we present and evaluate a collaborative approach where a network operator measures the behavior of overlay users and promotes a subset of them in terms of upand download bandwidth. This creates an incentive to users and overlay providers to cooperate by using locality awareness according to the operator’s policies. We evaluate our approach both with a real application and via extensive simulations to analyze the user selection metrics and the impact on different network operators. Our study shows that this cooperative traffic management approach leads to a situation that is beneficial for users, content providers, and network operators.