On Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:51:08 -0800 Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@cisco.com> wrote:
On Jan 20, 2007, at 6:14 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
It doesn't seem that the P2P application developers are doing it, maybe because they don't care because it doesn't directly impact them, or maybe because they don't know how to. If squid could provide a traffic localising solution which is just another traffic sink or source (e.g. a server) to an ISP, rather than something that requires enabling knobs on the network infrastructure for special handling or requires special traffic engineering for it to work, I'd think you'd get quite a bit of interest.
I think there's interest from the consumer level, already:
http://torrentfreak.com/review-the-wireless-BitTorrent-router/
It's early days, but if this becomes the norm, then the end-users themselves will end up doing the caching.
Maybe I haven't understood what that exactly does, however it seems to me that's really just a bit-torrent client/server in the ADSL router. Certainly having a bittorrent server in the ADSL router is unique, but not really what I was getting at. What I'm imagining (and I'm making some assumptions about how bittorrent works) would be bittorrent "super" peer that : * announces itself as a very generous provider of bittorrent fragments. * selects which peers to offer it's generosity to, by measuring it's network proximity of those peers. I think bittorrent uses TCP, and it would seem to me that TCP's own round trip and througput measuring would be a pretty good source to measuring network locality. * This super peer could also have it's generosity announcements restricted to certain IP address ranges etc. Actually, thinking about it a bit more, for this device to work well it would need to somehow be inline with the bit torrent seed URLs, so maybe that wouldn't be feasible to have a server in the ISP's network do it. Still, if BT peer software was modified to take into account the TCP measurements when selecting peers, I think it would probably go a long way towards mitigating some of the traffic problems that P2P seems to be causing. Regards, Mark. -- "Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly alert." - Bruce Schneier, "Beyond Fear"