Cooperative traffic management for video streaming overlays

Peer-to-peer (P2P) based overlays often ignore the boundaries of network domains and make traffic management challenging for network operators. Locality-aware techniques are a promising approach to alleviate this impact, but often benefit only network operators and fail to provide similar benefits to end-users and overlay providers. This is especially severe with video streaming overlays that are responsible for a large amount of Internet traffic. In this paper we present and evaluate a collaborative approach where a network operator measures the behavior of overlay users and promotes a subset of them in terms of up- and download bandwidth. This creates an incentive to users and overlay providers to cooperate by using locality awareness according to the operator’s policies. We evaluate our approach both with a real application and via extensive simulations to analyze the user selection metrics and the impact on different network operators. Our study shows that this cooperative traffic management approach leads to a situation that is beneficial for users, content providers, and network operators.