On the interactions between non-cooperative P2P overlay and traffic engineering behaviors

Abstract

Emerging Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies have enabled various types of content to be efficiently distributed over the Internet. Most P2P systems adopt selfish peer selection schemes in the application layer that in some sense optimize the user quality of experience. On the network side, traffic engineering (TE) is deployed by ISPs in order to achieve overall efficient network resource utilization. These TE operations are typically performed without distinguishing between P2P flows and other types of traffic. Due to inconsistent or even conflicting objectives from the perspectives of P2P overlay and network-level TE, the interactions between the two and their impact on the performance for each is likely to be non-optimal, and also has not yet been investigated in detail. In this paper we study such non-cooperative interactions by modeling best-reply dynamics, in which the P2P overlay and network-level TE optimize their own strategies based on the decision of the other player in the previous round. According to our simulations results based on data from the ABILENE network, P2P overlays exhibit strong resilience to adverse TE operations in maintaining end-to-end performance at the application layer. In addition, we show that network-level TE may suffer from performance deterioration caused by greedy peer (re-)selection behavior in reacting to previous TE adjustments.