North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Sun Oct 21 11:44:35 2007

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Florian Weimer wrote: 
If its not the content, why are network engineers at many university
networks, enterprise networks, public networks concerned about the
impact particular P2P protocols have on network operations?  If it was
just a single network, maybe they are evil.  But when many different
networks all start responding, then maybe something else is the
problem.


Uhm, what about civil liability?  It's not necessarily a technical issue
that motivates them, I think.


If it was civil liability, why are they responding to the protocol being
used instead of the content?

So is Sun RPC.  I don't think the original implementation performs
exponential back-off.

If lots of people were still using Sun RPC, causing other subscribers to complain, then I suspect you would see similar attempts to throttle it.


If there is a technical reason, it's mostly that the network as deployed
is not sufficient to meet user demands.  Instead of providing more
resources, lack of funds may force some operators to discriminate
against certain traffic classes.  In such a scenario, it doesn't even
matter much that the targeted traffic class transports content of
questionable legaility.  It's more important that the measures applied
to it have actual impact (Amdahl's law dictates that you target popular
traffic), and that you can get away with it (this is where the legality
comes into play).

Sandvine, packeteer, etc boxes aren't cheap either. The problem is giving
P2P more resources just means P2P consumes more resources, it doesn't solve the problem of sharing those resources with other users. Only if P2P shared network resources with other applications well does increasing network resources make more sense.