Cache Bandwidth Allocation for P2P File-Sharing Systems to Minimize Inter-ISP Traffic

Abstract

Many Internet service providers (ISPs) have deployed peer-to-peer (P2P) caches in their networks in order to decrease costly inter-ISP traffic. A P2P cache stores parts of the most popular contents locally, and if possible serves the requests of local peers to decrease the inter-ISP traffic. Traditionally, P2P cache resource management focuses on managing the storage resource of the cache so as to maximize the inter-ISP traffic savings. In this paper, we show that when there are many overlays competing for the upload bandwidth of a P2P cache, then in order to maximize the inter-ISP traffic savings, the cache's upload bandwidth should be actively allocated among the overlays. We formulate the problem of P2P cache bandwidth allocation as a Markov decision process and propose three approximations to the optimal cache bandwidth allocation policy. We use extensive simulations and experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed policies, and show that the bandwidth allocation policy that prioritizes swarms with a small ratio of local peers to all peers in the swarm can improve the inter-ISP traffic savings in BitTorrent-like P2P systems by up to 30%-60%.