[p2pi] Thoughts on how IETF standards can help P2P/ISPs

[Laird Popkin <laird at pando.com>]

As we discussed last week at the IETF P2Pi Workshop, here are a list of some of the ways that IETF standards can potentially help P2P applications make better network decisions, and thus help ISPs. This isn't a complete list, but I hope that it's at least a useful starting point for a discussion.

- Expose more information about TCP streams. For example, expose whether the stream is congested. Currently some p2p applications use a variety of techniques to attempt to guess whether a user's internet connection is congested (e.g. monitoring ping times), and measures stream throughput which could be viewed as a very rough measure of congestion, but it would be more accurate and efficient if TCP told the application when a stream was congested. Even better would be to get some indication of where the congestion occurred. For example, if the congestion is in the 'last mile', or the other peer's 'last mile', or somewhere in between, different responses would be appropriate. For example, if my internet connection is fine, but the peer's connection is congested, I should slow down transfers from that peer, and pull more from other peers. This is, of course, easier said than done.

- Expose some measure of 'communications cost' so that p2p apps could select the lowest cost available data sources. (This is what the P4P protocol does, for example). If using this guidance benefits both P2Ps and ISPs, it is a win-win. This is a fairly broad area that might include a number of steps/messages/protocols in order to address service location, mapping IPs to location, and "cost". The P4PWG is researching this area, and while it feels a little early to propose a standard, it's certainly an area (IMO) that could benefit from attention.

- ISP's could expose usage metrics. For example, if a user has a link that is capable of 1 Mbps, has a monthly transfer capacity of 500 GB, and has used 350 GB so far, then the application can make better choices, and application users could make informed choices. If the ISP could tell applications when the user's internet connection is congested, that would be extremely helpful.

- Allow applications to tag some traffic as 'not time sensitive' so that ISPs can manage bulk traffic as lower priority than time-sensitive traffic. There would need to be a benefit to the application for doing so, such as excluding such traffic from ISP capacity limits.

- Laird Popkin, CTO, Pando Networks
  mobile: 646/465-0570
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