A bottleneck-free model for P4P

Abstract

Provider Portal for Applications (P4P) is a model aiming to incorporate (peer to peer) P2P applications with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and improve the performance of the both ISP and the P2P applications. In this study, we have analyzed the relationship between the link traffic and the P-distance, which is the core interface of P4P. In addition, the limitation of P4P in dealing with network applications having bottleneck links is illustrated. Furthermore, taking link utility function as the optimization objective, we propose a Bottleneck-Free model for P4P (BFP), making the traffic produced by P2P applications more homogeneous, which can reduce the peak link utilization, protect bottleneck links, and thereby improve both the network efficiency and the P2P performance. We have built a simulation platform based on BitTorrent and conducted extensive simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that BFP achieves a lower cost for ISPs and a better performance for P2P applications than P4P and native P2P applications, both in intra-domain and inter-domain settings. BFP performs steadily in different topologies and swarm sizes, proving that it is scalable and easy to deploy.