Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

Sam Stickland sam_mailinglists at spacething.org
Tue Oct 23 13:43:24 UTC 2007


Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>
> On 22-okt-2007, at 18:12, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
>> Network operators probably aren't operating from altruistic 
>> principles, but for most network operators when the pain isn't spread 
>> equally across the the customer base it represents a "fairness" 
>> issue.  If 490 customers are complaining about bad network 
>> performance and the cause is traced to what 10 customers are doing, 
>> the reaction is to hammer the nails sticking out.
>
> The problem here is that they seem to be using a sledge hammer: 
> BitTorrent is essentially left dead in the water. And they deny doing 
> anything, to boot.
>
> A reasonable approach would be to throttle the offending applications 
> to make them fit inside the maximum reasonable traffic envelope.
>
> What I would like is a system where there are two diffserv traffic 
> classes: normal and scavenger-like. When a user trips some predefined 
> traffic limit within a certain period, all their traffic is put in the 
> scavenger bucket which takes a back seat to normal traffic. P2P users 
> can then voluntarily choose to classify their traffic in the lower 
> service class where it doesn't get in the way of interactive 
> applications (both theirs and their neighbor's). I believe Azureus can 
> already do this today. It would even be somewhat reasonable to require 
> heavy users to buy a new modem that can implement this.
Surely you would only want to set traffic that falls outside the limit 
as scavenger, rather than all of it?

S



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