On the Impact of P2P File Sharing Traffic Restrictions on User Perceived Performance

Abstract

Peer to peer (P2P) file sharing (FS) applications represent, today, the major traffic source on the Internet. Unlike other traffic types, such as HTTP, where the major traffic sources are identifiable, peers are, by definition, spread over the Internet, making it hard for ISPs to architect their networks to accommodate Peer to Peer traffic. In order to alleviate the impact of P2P FS traffic on other applications, ISPs often resort to price strategies based on traffic or traffic shaping techniques, in order to restrict P2P FS applications usage. The success of these initiatives is often limited, as they may aggravate other customers which do not use P2P FS or be circumvented by some of the P2P FS applications, which try to misrepresent their traffic as belonging to other applications. In this paper we study the impact that different methods for P2P FS traffic reduction have on the traffic carried by ISPs and on the download performance perceived by P2P FS users. Through simulation we compared the usage of traffic shaping with the more recent techniques Biased Neighbour Selection (BNS) and Adaptive Search Radius (ASR). We observed that traffic shaping provides ISPs with the fewer traffic savings, especially when compared to the price paid by P2P FS users. BNS and ASR provide similar benefits for users and ISPs. We've also observed that BNS and ASR are complementary technologies, which may be combined in order to achieve higher efficiency.