A Remedy for Network Operators against Increasing P2P Traffic: Enabling Packet Cache for P2P Applications

We observe that P2P traffic has peculiar characteristics as opposed to the other type of traffic such as web browsing and file transfer. Since they exploit swarm effect — a multitude of end points downloading the same content piece by piece nearly at the same time, thus, increasing the effectiveness of caching — the same pieces of data end up traversing the network over and over again within mostly a short time window. In the light of this observation, we propose a network layer packet-level caching for reducing the volume of emerging P2P traffic, transparently to the P2P applications — without affecting operations of the P2P applications at all — rather than banning it, restricting it, or modifying P2P systems themselves. Unlike the other caching techniques, we aim to provide as generic a caching mechanism as possible at network layer — without knowing much detail of P2P application protocols — to extend applicability to arbitrary P2P protocols. Our preliminary evaluation shows that our approach is expected to reduce a significant amount of P2P traffic transparently to P2P applications. key words: P2P, overlay networks, packet cache, P4P, future Internet