Deutsch Intern
Chair of Computer Science III

ISPeer

ISPeer: ISP-friendly Peer-assisted Content Distribution


ISPeer Project Team

Head György Dan, KTH Stockholm
Tobias Hoßfeld, University of Würzburg
George D. Stamoulis, AUEB Athens
Piotr Cholda, AGH Krakow
Researchers Simon Oechsner
Frank Lehrieder
Ioanna Papapfili
Rafal Stankiewicz
Robert Wojcik
Jerzy Domzal

Summary

A variety of peer-to-peer content distribution systems have emerged in recent years that use logical overlays on top of the physical Internet infrastructure for distributing content among the users. In these peer-to-peer systems the available resources of the end users are typically utilized to help the content dissemination process: the end users assist the system by storing data locally and by uploading data to other users. Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems have been the dominant source of traffic in the Internet over the past years. The recent rise of the popularity of streaming video services, like YouTube, shows however that there is sufficient interest for video-on-demand and hence it can become a major source of Internet traffic in the future. Consequently, peer-to-peer video streaming applications, which offer either video-on-demand, live streaming or both, are expected to gain popularity. There are already a number of commercial peer-to-peer applications for video distribution, for example, Joost, PPLive, Zattoo, SopCast, and TVAnts.

The large amount of data exchanged in overlay applications is a significant source of costs for Internet service providers (ISPs). Overlays typically span the networks of several ISPs, and due to the logical separation of the overlay and the physical network topology, content is often exchanged between end users that reside in different ISPs. Such inter-domain traffic leads to interconnection costs for the ISPs. Consequently, an ISP would like to (i) control and manage the traffic from overlay applications in order to reduce its traffic costs and (ii) compete with the existing applications by offering data distribution services himself instead of being just a bit pipe.

In the context of this project we will consider the problem of ISP managed peer-assisted content distribution systems for video-on-demand streaming, as opposed to a centralized content distribution system that is used nowadays in most video-on-demand applications. Using a peer-assisted content distribution system the ISP can reduce its CAPEX costs by saving on server capacity, and it can provide an efficient and robust content distribution system with a high availability of the content. Using such a system, an ISP has a technical incentive to attract many customers to use its service, because the performance of the peer-assisted CDN increases with the number of users.

 

In order to reduce the costs due to inter-domain traffic across the network borders of an ISP, the ISP as provider of the CDN has different options to control the overlay traffic. On one hand, additional entities, like caches, can be installed. On the other hand, the ISP can provide the means so that sophisticated cooperation strategies can be employed among the peers, e.g., they can take into account the network topology or any other useful information, and this cooperation might lead to a more ISP-friendly way of content distribution.

 

The aim of the proposed specific EuroNF project is the development of a cooperation strategy using the example of a peer-assisted content distribution overlay for video streaming. We consider that the ISP offers a peer-assisted content distribution system, which means that a cooperative interaction between the overlay and the ISP is possible. To be more precise, our main objectives are:

  • Identify requirements for ISP-friendly content distribution
  • Identify the network-related information that should be interchanged between the ISP and the overlay
  • Develop a cooperation framework which takes into account useful information from the ISP for topology forming and the resource management in the overlay
  • Determine and evaluate the gain obtained by using the proposed solution

Phone Conferences

  • September 16th, 2008, 10-11am, Kick-off meeting
  • October 21st, 2008, 10-11am, WP1 discussion and survey paper
  • November 27th, 2008, 2-3pm, discuss draft of paper
  • January 13th, 2009, 2:30-3:30pm, pre-final version
  • January 26th, 2009, 2-3pm, final version
  • February 26th, 2009, 1:30-2:30pm, plans for WP2 and WP3, status of simulations
  • April 28th, 2009, 2-3pm, first initial results for WP2 and WP3 from partners
  • May 26th, 2009, 2-3pm, results for WP2 and WP3, proposals for joint papers

Meetings

  • Physical meeting in Würzburg, March 18th, 2009, 1-6pm

Other Stuff


Article[ to top ]
  • Interaction Patterns between P2P Content Distribution Systems and ISPs. Dán, György; Stamoulis, George D.; Hoßfeld, Tobias; Oechsner, Simon; Cholda, Piotr; Stankiewicz, Rafal; Papafili, Ioanna. In to be published in IEEE Communications Magazine. 2010.
Inproceedings[ to top ]
  • The Impact of Caching on BitTorrent-like Peer-to-peer Systems. Lehrieder, Frank; Dán, György; Hoßfeld, Tobias; Oechsner, Simon; Singeorzan, Vlad. In 10th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing 2010 - IEEE P2P 2010. Best Paper Award, Delft, the Netherlands, 2010.