Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com
Sun Oct 21 15:42:55 UTC 2007


On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> If its not the content, why are network engineers at many university
>> networks, enterprise networks, public networks concerned about the
>> impact particular P2P protocols have on network operations?  If it was
>> just a single network, maybe they are evil.  But when many different
>> networks all start responding, then maybe something else is the
>> problem.
> 
> Uhm, what about civil liability?  It's not necessarily a technical issue
> that motivates them, I think.

If it was civil liability, why are they responding to the protocol being
used instead of the content?

> So is Sun RPC.  I don't think the original implementation performs
> exponential back-off.

If lots of people were still using Sun RPC, causing other subscribers to 
complain, then I suspect you would see similar attempts to throttle it.


> If there is a technical reason, it's mostly that the network as deployed
> is not sufficient to meet user demands.  Instead of providing more
> resources, lack of funds may force some operators to discriminate
> against certain traffic classes.  In such a scenario, it doesn't even
> matter much that the targeted traffic class transports content of
> questionable legaility.  It's more important that the measures applied
> to it have actual impact (Amdahl's law dictates that you target popular
> traffic), and that you can get away with it (this is where the legality
> comes into play).

Sandvine, packeteer, etc boxes aren't cheap either.  The problem is giving
P2P more resources just means P2P consumes more resources, it doesn't 
solve the problem of sharing those resources with other users. Only if 
P2P shared network resources with other applications well does increasing 
network resources make more sense.



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