BiCo: Network operator-friendly P2P traffic control through bilateral cooperation with peers

The volume of P2P application traffic has increased so much that network operator-friendly traffic control techniques are recently proposed to localize the P2P traffic. In the existing approaches, the network operator provides network information as a guidance to peers so that the P2P traffic will flow as they intend, thus, realizing unilateral interaction from the network operator to the peers. In this paper, we propose bilateral cooperation between the network operator and the peers, in short BiCo. In BiCo, both parties participate in the P2P traffic control actively to improve a network efficiency while solving the identified limitations of existing work. In a nutshell, the peers provide peer-level information to the network operator, which would otherwise require the network operator to perform a flow-level measurement and analysis. We divide measurement work into two parts, letting the peers collect fine-grained traffic information and enabling the network operator to grasp macroscopic information in order to issue useful guidances (including allowable traffic volume missing in the existing work) to the peers. Our simulation results show that BiCo improves the network efficiency by distributing the traffic evenly over intra-domain links and by trying to fully utilize inter-domain links with given constraints while showing similar download completion time compared to the existing unilateral interaction.