Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

Mon Oct 22 01:13:13 UTC 2007

On Oct 22, 2007, at 7:50 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:

>  Will P2P applications really never learn to play nicely on the  
> network?

Here are some more specific questions:

Is some of the difficulty perhaps related to the seemingly  
unconstrained number of potential distribution points in systems of  
this type, along with 'fairness' issues in terms of bandwidth  
consumption of each individual node for upload purposes, and are  
there programmatic ways of altering this behavior in order to reduce  
the number, severity, and duration of 'hot-spots' in the physical  
network topology?

Is there some mechanism by which these applications could potentially  
leverage some of the CDNs out there today?  Have SPs who've deployed  
P2P-aware content-caching solutions on their own networks observed  
any benefits for this class of application?

Would it make sense for SPs to determine how many P2P 'heavy-hitters'  
they could afford to service in a given region of the topology and  
make a limited number of higher-cost accounts available to those  
willing to pay for the privilege of participating in these systems?   
Would moving heavy P2P users over to metered accounts help resolve  
some of the problems, assuming that even those metered accounts would  
have some QoS-type constraints in order to ensure they don't consume  
all available bandwidth?

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Roland Dobbins <rdobbins at cisco.com> // 408.527.6376 voice

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