[p2pi] ALTO BoF - Charter

["Roy, Radhika R Dr CTR USA USAMC" <radhika.r.roy at us.army.mil>]

Hi, all:

Many of us do not understand the words "Oracle" and "Tracker" right form the charter.

So, the above two words have been clarified in the modified one as follows (also enclosed in a file with change marks).

BR/Radhika

DRAFT CHARTER

A significant part of the Internet traffic is today generated by
peer-to-peer (P2P) applications used for file sharing, real-time
communications and live media streaming. Contrary to client/server
architectures, P2P applications access resources distributed across
the Internet (e.g. files or media relays) and exchange large amounts
of data in connections that they establish directly with nodes hosting
such resources.

One of the advantages of P2P systems comes from the fact that the
resources they offer are often made available through multiple
instances. Yet, applications generally ignore the topology of the
latent overlay network and have to select among available instances
based on information they deduce from empirical measurements which
often lead to suboptimal choices. Optimizing such selection brings
about, on the one hand, an increase in P2P applications performance
and, on the other hand a better use of network resources.

The Working Group will produce protocols to enable communications
between P2P systems and "informed" external services in order to
optimize peer selection. The “informed” external service is assumed to be provided by the peer selection server. The WG will consider tracker-based P2P
systems (a la Bit Torrent) that communicate among its Internet Service Provider (ISP)-based P2P systems as well as tracker-less (i.e. Non-ISP) P2P networks. Both
type of P2P formations -- structured as well as unstructured -- will
be considered.

Furthermore, recognizing that the discovery of nearby peers has equal
applicability to many real-time communications protocols (for example,
the discovery of the nearest relay that will enable the establishment
of a VoIP session), the WG will attempt to produce deliverables
consisting of generic mechanisms that are broadly applicable to many
current and future applications.

The WG will focus on the following items.

- Surveys and taxonomies. (a) A survey of existing solutions for peer
selection optimization. Internet coordinate systems, path selection
services and various forms of collaboration between Internet Service
Providers (ISP) and P2P networks have been recently proposed,
simulated and deployed with encouraging results. (b) A survey of
existing solutions for service discovery (both in P2P and
traditional client-server systems.) (c) Taxonomy of other classes
of applications -- besides P2P -- that can benefit from topological
proximity information.

- A requirements document. This document will list requirements for a
peer selection service, identifying, for example, what kind of
information P2P applications will need for optimizing their choices.

- A discovery mechanism for locating the peer selection server oracle. Certain applications
may use a tracker and the intelligence embedded in it to find nearby
peers, others may simply want the oracle to sort a list of IP
addresses. Regardless, applications will use the discovery
mechanism for locating the proper server to query, which may vary
depending on factors such as, for example, their network location.

- A signaling protocol for querying the peer selection server oracle. Once located,
applications will use this protocol for querying information useful
for peer selection. A sample deliverable will be a document that
defines the PDU layout of the query/response packets. Informational
documents that outline an API of some sort could also be produced.

This WG will focus solely on the interface exposed to P2P systems by
peer selection services; if, in the future, the IETF will consider the
opportunity to work on protocols for actually implementing such
systems (e.g. application-layer protocols for Internet coordinate
systems, routing protocol extensions for ISP-based solutions), such
work will be done in strict coordination with the appropriate WGs.

Issues related to the content exchanged in P2P systems are excluded
from the Working Group's scope, as is the issue dealing with enforcing
the legality of the content

Attachment: ALTO draft charter-rrr.txt
Description: Binary data

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