Distributed applications --such as file sharing, real-time communication, and live and on-demand media streaming --prevalent on the Internet use a significant amount of network resources. Such applications often transfer large amounts of data through connections established between nodes distributed across the Internet with little knowledge of the underlying network topology. Some applications are so designed that they choose a random subset of peers from a larger set with which to exchange data. Absent any topology information guiding such choices, or acting on suboptimal or local information obtained from measurements and statistics, these applications often make less than desirable choices.This document discusses issues related to an information-sharing service that enables applications to perform better-than-random peer selection.

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Abstract-Today, most P2P applications do not consider locality on the underlying network topology when choosing their neighbors on the P2P routing layer. As a result, participating peers may experience long delays and peers' ISPs suffer from a large amount of (costly) inter-ISP traffic. One potential solution to mitigate these problems is to have ISPs or third parties convey information regarding the underlying network topology to P2P-clients through a dedicated service. Following this approach, the IETF has recently formed an Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) working group for standardizing a protocol to enable P2P applications to obtain information regarding network layer topology. This paper comprises the problem space for such an ALTO approach, taking into account recent developments in the IETF ALTO Working Group. In particular, we will describe requirements for an ALTO protocol identified in the IETF, concrete protocols which have been proposed so far, and the overall challenges. In addition, we will discuss related issues such as privacy considerations, the relationship of an ALTO service with existing caching solutions, discovery mechanisms for an ALTO service, and security considerations.

International audiencePeer to Peer streaming (P2P-TV) applications have recently emerged as cheap and efficient solutions to provide real time streaming services over the Internet. For the sake of simplicity, typical P2P-TV systems are designed and optimized following a pure layered approach, thus ignoring the effect of design choices on the underlying transport network. This simple approach, however, may constitute a threat for the network providers, due to the congestion that P2P-TV traffic can potentially generate. In this article, we present and discuss the architecture of an innovative, network cooperative P2PTV application that is being designed and developed within the STREP Project NAPA WINE. Our application is explicitly targeted to favor cooperation between the application and the transport network layer

In this work, we outline how to enable InformationCentric Networking (ICN) on existing IP networks, such as ISP or data center networks, using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) functions and control. We describe a mechanism that requires neither new or extended network/L3 and transport/L4 protocols nor changes of ICN host network stacks, and supports aggregation of routes inside the SDN controlled network. The proposed solution is agnostic of the specific ICN protocol in use, and does not require all network elements to be SDN-enabled. It supports advanced ICN routing features like request aggregation and forking, as well as load-balancing, traffic engineering, and explicit path steering (e. g., through ICN caches). We present the design as well as our first implementation of the proposed scheme-based on the Trema OpenFlow controller-framework and CCNx.