Google wants to be your Internet

Sun Jan 21 03:38:04 UTC 2007

On Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:51:08 -0800
Roland Dobbins <rdobbins at cisco.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Jan 20, 2007, at 6:14 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> 
> > It doesn't seem that the P2P
> > application developers are doing it, maybe because they don't care
> > because it doesn't directly impact them, or maybe because they don't
> > know how to. If squid could provide a traffic localising solution  
> > which
> > is just another traffic sink or source (e.g. a server) to an ISP,
> > rather than something that requires enabling knobs on the network
> > infrastructure for special handling or requires special traffic
> > engineering for it to work, I'd think you'd get quite a bit of
> > interest.
> 
> I think there's interest from the consumer level, already:
> 
> http://torrentfreak.com/review-the-wireless-BitTorrent-router/
> 
> It's early days, but if this becomes the norm, then the end-users  
> themselves will end up doing the caching.
> 

Maybe I haven't understood what that exactly does, however it seems to
me that's really just a bit-torrent client/server in the ADSL router.
Certainly having a bittorrent server in the ADSL router is unique, but
not really what I was getting at.

What I'm imagining (and I'm making some assumptions about how
bittorrent works) would be bittorrent "super" peer that :

* announces itself as a very generous provider of bittorrent fragments.
* selects which peers to offer it's generosity to, by measuring it's
network proximity of those peers. I think bittorrent uses TCP, and it
would seem to me that TCP's own round trip and througput measuring
would be a pretty good source to measuring network locality.
* This super peer could also have it's generosity announcements
restricted to certain IP address ranges etc.

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, for this device to work well it
would need to somehow be inline with the bit torrent seed URLs, so maybe
that wouldn't be feasible to have a server in the ISP's network do it.
Still, if BT peer software was modified to take into account the TCP
measurements when selecting peers, I think it would probably go a long
way towards mitigating some of the traffic problems that P2P seems to be
causing.

Regards,
Mark.

-- 

        "Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly
         alert."
                                   - Bruce Schneier, "Beyond Fear"