SPOP: A Service Provider Oriented Peer-to-peer architecture

BitTorrent occupies actually a dominant part of the Internet traffic for various applications. The protocol provides an efficient transport level but is devoid of real management and control layers. In this paper we propose a Service Provider network architecture based on BitTorrent protocol where Peer-to-Peer (P2P) peering traffic is reduced and P2P data transfer is sped up. We first add a Control/Management level to the original BitTorrent architecture provided by an entity called the hTracker that allows traffic portioning among Autonomous Systems (ASs). Secondly we propose a Context-Aware DHT (Distributed Hash Table) algorithm that optimizes routing/lookup component based on network parameters and that generalizes the first contribution taking into consideration AS membership. Then the last contribution consists in optimizing BitTorrent transport level by applying FEC (Forward Error Correction) mechanism that speed up the download while maintaining interoperability. When the network presents a lack of resources the Service Provider can instantiate special FEC peers to overcome this deficiency. These contributions strive for an Service Provider Oriented Peer-to-peer (SPOP) architecture. The large-scale simulations show valuable results that validate the solution.