Analysis of peer selection algorithms in cross-layer P2P architectures

The large amount of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic in today´s Internet represents a great challenge for most Internet Service providers (ISPs). P2P traffic does not conform to traditional ISP traffic policies, and it makes it harder to perform traffic engineering in the network. It is especially the peer-selection mechanism of the P2P application that influences the traffic patterns and creates an imbalance for the ISP business. Some ISPs benefit from the P2P traffic, while others suffer. There are research efforts proposing cross-layer solutions where the P2P application uses the underlying routing information for the peer selection. These works put a lot of focus on improving the application performance, but take to a little extent into account how the ISPs are affected. In this paper we propose a framework to measure the effects of the peer-selection mechanism, not only on the P2P application performance, but also on the economy of different types of ISPs. We categorize all ISPs into three groups; core, transit and stub, depending on their position in the global Internet hierarchy. Using our proposed framework, we analyze the performance of different peer-selection algorithms.