Reducing redundant cross-ISP traffic in peer-to-peer systems via explicit coordination

Locality-aware P2P file sharing systems have drawn the attention of the research community as a promising technique to alleviate the tussle between P2P traffic and ISPs. However, existing locality-based schemes mainly focus on how to distinguish whether a peer is local or not and pay less attention to how to utilize the locality information. Typically, they simply bias the peer selection towards local peers in the hope that it will reduce cross-ISP traffic. In this paper, we argue that such coarse-grained control is inadequate and propose a fine-grained mechanism called Swarm-over-Swarm (SOS). Through explicit coordination on piece selection among local peers, SOS is much more effective in reducing redundant cross-ISP traffic than existing schemes. We implement SOS in both NS-2 and a real BitTorrent client and demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution via both simulations and Internet experiments.