Cooperative caching and relaying strategies for peer-to-peer content delivery

Peer-to-peer content distribution has become a major source of bandwidth costs for Internet service providers (ISPs). One way for ISPs to decrease these costs is to deploy caches for p2p traffic. To make efficient use of the caches, in this paper we propose a cooperative caching and relaying scheme that is compatible with the existing business relations between ISPs. We formulate the problem of cooperative caches as a resource allocation problem, and show that it is related to the problem of r-configuration studied in graph theory. We propose a distributed algorithm to solve the resource allocation problem, and show that cooperation leads to significant gains compared to non-cooperative caching.