NECO: P4P: Provider Portal for (P2P) Network Applications

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The increasing integration of novel network applications, in particular, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, into the Internet content distribution infrastructure is posing significant new challenges to achieving efficient and fair utilization of Internet network resources. In particular, by largely network oblivious, these network applications can cause substantial problems on network efficiency, Internet economics, and application performance. The objective of this project is to develop a novel, light-weight framework called P4P that provides standard, modular interfaces to allow Internet network providers and network applications to jointly optimize their respective performance. The P4P interfaces are designed through rigorous mathematical derivations to achieve extensibility, scalability and efficiency in large-scale, heterogeneous networks. The interfaces consider not only network provider privacy but also end-user privacy. The interfaces take into consideration not only traditional performance metrics but also increasingly important economic and business policies. This project advances the state of the art in facilitating the interactions across different Internet network layers and entities, and presents a transformative research that enables others to effectively integrate network applications into network management. The interfaces designed in the project will be specified in an open, standard language. The reference implementations will be made available broadly to facilitate integration into the Internet infrastructure. A P4P research group will be formed to maximize open research and disseminate results widely among network operators and application developers.