Will P2P users cooperate with ISPs? A word-of-mouth communication approach

Researchers who address the problem of application-level traffic optimization often consider only the simplest comparison scenario: (a) the case before the option to cooperate and optimize the service is enabled, and (b) the case in which all clients try to optimize the traffic. In this paper, the situations that a user may not wish to cooperate or that a user does not perceive the optimization possibility to be valuable enough to cooperate are taken into account. An analytical model for estimating the popularity of the cooperate-to-optimize option is derived. A method for calculating the time-dependent value of the predicted popularity is presented. The model is verified by simulation experiments.