Cooperative traffic management for video streaming overlays

• Published in: Computer networks (Amsterdam, Netherlands : 1999) Netherlands : 1999), 2012-02, Vol.56 (3), p.1118-1130
• Main Authors: Pussep, Konstantin, Lehrieder, Frank, Gross, Christian, Oechsner, Simon, Guenther, Markus, Meyer, Sebastian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandwidths; File sharing; ISPs; Locality; Network flow problem; Networks; Peer to peer computing; Peer-to-peer; Streaming media; Studies; Traffic flow; Traffic management; Video; Video streaming
• ISSN: 1389-1286; 1872-7069
• DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2011.10.027

Peer-to-peer (P2P) based overlays often ignore the boundaries of network domains and make traffic management challenging for network operators. Locality-aware techniques are a promising approach to alleviate this impact, but often benefit only network operators and fail to provide similar benefits to end-users and overlay providers. This is especially severe with video streaming overlays that are responsible for a large amount of Internet traffic. In this paper we present and evaluate a collaborative approach where a network operator measures the behavior of overlay users and promotes a subset of them in terms of up- and download bandwidth. This creates an incentive to users and overlay providers to cooperate by using locality awareness according to the operator’s policies. We evaluate our approach both with a real application and via extensive simulations to analyze the user selection metrics and the impact on different network operators. Our study shows that this cooperative traffic management approach leads to a situation that is beneficial for users, content providers, and network operators.