On the Effects of Overlay Localization on P2P Networks

Recently several studies have been made on reducing overall network traffic by localizing P2P traffic. Interestingly, real world measurements show that these localization techniques often do not bring performance advantages to the P2P user, only to the underlying network by reducing average layer 3 hop count of individual transmissions. In this paper, we study the effects of localized traffic patterns on end-user performance, in the specific case of P2P-TV traffic. We find that, without assuming excess local networking resources (such as higher bandwidth), localization reduces end-user performance considerably due to the resulting clustered overlay structure. We investigate (though simulation) the amount of random overlay edges and the amount of local bandwidth surplus that can mitigate this negative effect of preferring local connections.