A simulation study of application-layer traffic optimization protocol for P2P applications

Since peer-to-peer (P2P) applications like BitTorrent are prevalent on the Internet, the amount of Internet traffic is explosively growing. The traffic caused by P2P applications to share large files have a considerable impact on the network operation, because P2P applications significantly consume network resources and often saturate the capacity of broadband access, inter-domain, or international links. Currently, in order to optimize traffic, IETF Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) WG standardizes a traffic localization protocol that provides location and ranking information to peers, that will be useful for reducing overall traffic load by connecting nearest peers instead of random ones. In this work, we verify the effectiveness of ALTO protocols from intensive simulations on a scaled-down commercial network topology. From simulation results, we could observe that the total amount of traffic, the load of inter-domain and international links, and the user download time could be remarkably diminished.