An empirical study on the interactions between ALTO-assisted P2P overlays and ISP networks

The recently proposed Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) framework has opened up a new dimension for Internet traffic management that is complementary to the traditional application-agnostic traffic engineering (AATE) solutions currently employed by ISPs. In this paper, we investigate how ALTO-assisted Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic management functions interact with the underlying AATE operations, given that there may exist different application-layer policies in the P2P overlay. By considering specific P2P peer selection behaviors on top of a traffic-engineered ISP network, we conduct a performance analysis on how the application and network-layer respective performance is influenced by different policies at the P2P side. Our empirical study offers significant insight for the future design and analysis of cross-layer network engineering approaches that involve multiple autonomous optimization entities with both consistent and non-consistent policies.