To share content or not to share? This is the peering question

Traffic patterns in the Internet are changing, with video and user generated content (UGC) taking an increasing share of the volume, and P2P traffic decreases. The widespread appearing of content providers and content peering has been shown to decrease profit for ISPs. To reduce expenses, the use of P2P caches for UGC has been suggested. In this work, we look at the problem of UGC content sharing between peering ISPs. We show a method for testing whether sharing is beneficial for the ISPs. We then give a method for total objects placement such that the optimal demand is maximized, under the following constraints: (1) The local demand is known at each ISP; (2) ISPs share only if they can satisfy at least the same demand as before the sharing. We further simulate our method with different workloads distributions that exhibit either UGC or P2P characteristics.