ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy

penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."

Comments

Well, that took long enough

[Animats]

That's been the trouble with these "peer to peer" protocols. The routing algorithms have been horribly inefficient. It's quite possible to have the same data flowing in both directions on the same pipe. Multiple copies, even.

It might be cheaper for the telecom industry (which is big) to buy out the music industry (which is tiny) and just cache the RIAA's entire output on local servers. Just cacheing the top 100 releases or so might cut traffic in half.

(This won't scale to movies, though. Movies are bigger and more expensive to make.)

Re:Well, that took long enough

[crossmr]

No, not all. And nothing will be a magic bullet that is going to solve everything. You need to make improvements where you can. Any bittorrent application which supposedly takes up 175% of all internet traffic if some sources are to be believed and has more than 1 leecher on it will benefit from multicast. Live events, streaming music, and any other kind of service which isn't on-demand (you join something in progress rather than it starting fresh for you) will benefit from it.
On demand stuff can only benefit in the case where an ISP recognizes something is a popular download currently and caches it locally. Windows updates, virus definitions, etc. That would be a bugger of a system to automate though.

Remote Location Prejudice?

[EMeta]

I'm no expert in this field, but this sounds to me like computers in isolated areas would suddenly get the shaft. Am I missing something?

"Nearby peer" mechanisms are anticompetitive

[Brett Glass]

One thing that many people do not think about at first (but realize when it's pointed out to them) is that mechanisms which try to identify peers on the same ISP's network are anticompetitive. (That's why only the biggest carriers, like AT&T, support them.) Here's why. The cable and telephone monopolies have so many customers that the odds are there will be someone else on the same provider's network with the requested files. Small ISPs, on the other hand, will rarely if ever have someone with that file and so will still experience a great impact from the cost shifting and congestion caused by P2P. Hence, you can see why the big guys are cautiously embracing schemes like "P4P" as an anticompetitive weapon to block new entrants -- particularly wireless ones.

Re:internet gps using Akamai's servers

[billstewart]

Akamai's content distribution system works by putting large numbers of small caching servers around the internet, on ISP networks, and using algorithms to connect clients to the closest server while doing some level of load-balancing. (There are other CDNs that work by putting small numbers of large servers at peering points.) So if two clients get connected to the same Akamai server when they're retrieving some Akamai customer's content, they're probably nearby in a network sense. That doesn't require getting lots of detail from Akamai's network - though it might be more accurate if it did.

It's an interesting approach - you can also do things like identifying IP addresses by BGP Autonomous System Number, which will tell you what sites are in the same ISP, but you might get better P2P performance by connecting to a peer on another ISP in your same city than a peer who's on your ISP but across the country. (Most ISPs seem to assign ASNs on roughly a continent or country level.) So sometimes you'll get better P2P performance by picking close ping times, but as the article says, pinging lots of potential peers can take a long time.

One way street, or no?

[Sun.Jedi]

In fact, when ISPs configure their networks properly, their software significantly improves transfer speeds Asking ISPs to properly configure their networks in response to specific application will, in all likelihood, garner the same result as me asking my 2 year old not to play in dog's water bowl. Can't Azure, bT, etc just limit, or filter TTL values to the same, or similar effect?

What about the Comcast effect? Although a joint venture would seem to help both sides, the bottom line from the network/legal/politician/*AA side is [voice of James Hetfield] P2P BAAAAD! [/voice].

Re:Double Edged Sword

[Kjella]

There's those, but there's also the techno-optimists that thinks any possible advance in science and technology must by definition be progress. Creating a super-resistant, super-lethal, super-contagious bioweapon may be a great feat of genetics and biochemisty, but I doubt it'd be to humanity's progress. It's quite impossible to turn back time and pretend we don't know what we know, but it doesn't mean that every change should be embraced. Take anonymous P2P which would mean absolute free speech, not just protected free speech. Anyone would be free to not just post copyrighted material but also slander, threaten, post private information, scam, spam and the infamous kiddie porn. In a democracy we all get together on agree on some rules, then we follow up on them. Total anonymity means each person does as only himself wants, that's simply anarchy. Is that a change we should just embrace like that? Are we sure we want all the consequences? Then there's also the techno-determinism, some argue we have no choice in the matter either way. That's a bit too easy, we need to take responsibility for what technology we use and how we use it.

Re:Any benefit for the user??

[Sancho]

I understand why location aware choking is helpful to ISPs - it reduces border traffic and their costs. Well depending upon how ISPs determine egregious bandwidth usage, it could be the difference between getting a letter telling you to cut back and slipping under the radar.

BitTorrent was designed for scalability

[billstewart]

BitTorrent was designed to be a scalable high-performance system. Ratios are part of making that work, and Bram went through several iterations of tuning to get the pyramid scheme to work well.

Early connectors are likely to have high ratios unless they abandon right after getting their full file, and late arrivers are going to be mostly leaching, and to some extent that's ok - but most people will get their files earlier if people are more generous, and also they'll get them earlier if they download from faster-uploading peers, and obviously it's helpful to keep at least one seeder around so that there's always a source of all the parts. Generosity's a Good Thing in this kind of network.

Also, don't confuse ratios for a given torrent with ratios over a series of files - this isn't Napster. If you've been seeding for a week, that's nice to everybody, but you're only getting rewarded or penalized on This One File, and hopefully you've received it by now and aren't waiting for some tracker to hand out the last block which it's keeping in reserve to force the early participants to reach higher upload ratios before they can leave...