[100428] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sam Stickland)
Tue Oct 23 09:55:02 2007
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:43:24 +0100
From: Sam Stickland <sam_mailinglists@spacething.org>
To: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
CC: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>, Bora Akyol <bora.akyol@aprius.com>,
nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <21897724-9A0B-419A-A6B4-2633DDD5A027@muada.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>
> On 22-okt-2007, at 18:12, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
>> Network operators probably aren't operating from altruistic
>> principles, but for most network operators when the pain isn't spread
>> equally across the the customer base it represents a "fairness"
>> issue. If 490 customers are complaining about bad network
>> performance and the cause is traced to what 10 customers are doing,
>> the reaction is to hammer the nails sticking out.
>
> The problem here is that they seem to be using a sledge hammer:
> BitTorrent is essentially left dead in the water. And they deny doing
> anything, to boot.
>
> A reasonable approach would be to throttle the offending applications
> to make them fit inside the maximum reasonable traffic envelope.
>
> What I would like is a system where there are two diffserv traffic
> classes: normal and scavenger-like. When a user trips some predefined
> traffic limit within a certain period, all their traffic is put in the
> scavenger bucket which takes a back seat to normal traffic. P2P users
> can then voluntarily choose to classify their traffic in the lower
> service class where it doesn't get in the way of interactive
> applications (both theirs and their neighbor's). I believe Azureus can
> already do this today. It would even be somewhat reasonable to require
> heavy users to buy a new modem that can implement this.
Surely you would only want to set traffic that falls outside the limit
as scavenger, rather than all of it?
S