2008 Volume E91.B Issue 12 Pages 3810-3820
We observe that P2P traffic has peculiar characteristics as opposed to the other type of traffic such as web browsing and file transfer. Since they exploit swarm effect — a multitude of end points downloading the same content piece by piece nearly at the same time, thus, increasing the effectiveness of caching — the same pieces of data end up traversing the network over and over again within mostly a short time window. In the light of this observation, we propose a network layer packet-level caching for reducing the volume of emerging P2P traffic, transparently to the P2P applications — without affecting operations of the P2P applications at all — rather than banning it, restricting it, or modifying P2P systems themselves. Unlike the other caching techniques, we aim to provide as generic a caching mechanism as possible at network layer — without knowing much detail of P2P application protocols — to extend applicability to arbitrary P2P protocols. Our preliminary evaluation shows that our approach is expected to reduce a significant amount of P2P traffic transparently to P2P applications.