P4P: Explicit Communications for Cooperative Control Between P2P and Network Providers

The emergence of peer-to-peer (P2P) is posing significant new challenges to achieving efficient and fair utilization of network resources. In particular, without the ability to explicitly communicate with network providers, P2P applications depend mainly on inefficient network inference and network-oblivious peering, leading to potential inefficiencies for both P2P applications and network providers. In this paper, we propose a simple, light-weight architecture called P4P to allow more effective cooperative traffic control between applications and network providers. Our evaluations show clear performance benefits of the framework.