Traffic control through bilateral cooperation between network operators and peers in P2P networks

The volume of P2P application traffic has increased so much that network-operator-driven traffic control techniques such as P4P for localizing the P2P traffic are recently proposed. The gist of the existing approach is that the network operators provide traffic and topology information as a guidance to peers so that P2P traffic will flow as the network operators intend, thus, realizing unilateral interaction from the network operators to the peers. Thus, this paper proposes bilateral cooperation between the network operators and the peers in P2P networks so that both parties may enjoy even further benefit in reducing cross-domain traffic and in optimizing content download time. In a nutshell, the peers provide peer-level network information to the network operators, which would otherwise require the network operators to perform costly flow-level analysis.We divide measurement work into two parts, letting the peers collect fine-grained traffic information and enabling the network operators to grasp macroscopic information in order to issue a useful guidance to peers including traffic bound missing in the existing work. Our simulation result shows that the bilateral cooperation reduces maximum link utilization of intra links by 34.41%, cross-network traffic by 23.02%, and content download time by 4.65% compared to the existing unilateral interaction.