Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

Fri Oct 26 06:32:22 UTC 2007

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, Sean Donelan wrote:

> When 5% of the users don't play nicely with the rest of the 95% of the 
> users; how can network operators manage the network so every user 
> receives a fair share of the network capacity?

By making sure that the 5% of users upstream capacity doesn't cause the 
distribution and core to be full. If the 5% causes 90% of the traffic and 
at peak the core is 98% full, the 95% of the users that cause 10% of the 
traffic couldn't tell the different from if the core/distribution was only 
used at 10%.

If your access media doesn't support what's needed (it might be a shared 
media like cable) then your original bad engineering decision of choosing 
a shared media without fairness implemented from the beginning is 
something you have to live with, and you have to keep making bad decisions 
and implementations to patch what's already broken to begin with.

You can't rely on end user applications to play fair when it comes to 
ISP network being full, and if they don't play fair and it's filling up 
the end user access, then it's that single end user that gets affected by 
it, not their neighbors.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se