Dynamic QoS Support for P2P Communications

Abstract

Scalable Quality of Service (QoS) control is of paramount importance to effectively enable a seamless convergence of the rapidly evolving Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay communications over the Internet since the latter only supports best-effort service paradigm. For example, the European Union (EU) funded ROMEO project is focusing on a joint use of DVB-T2 and P2P overlay networks for live multimedia content sharing and collaboration among multiple users. This raises a strong need that the media packets transmitted through the P2P overlay delivery system must arrive earlier enough at the end users to assure a proper synchronization of the multiple views that may be received via the hybrid network. For this purpose, the P2P network must assure a certain QoS guarantee in terms of bandwidth, delay, jitter, and loss. More importantly, the control must be scalable to prevent excessive signalling and the related processing overhead, usually suffered in the traditional per-flow QoS control approaches. In this view, recent research effort claimed that the Internet resources can be efficiently over-provisioned (booking more resources in-advance) in such a way to allow differentiation of QoS control with reduced signalling overhead and increased resource utilization. This approach, however, needs further investigations for proper integration into innovative networking architectural designs to achieve performance. In addition to that, and in order to provide an end-to-end QoS, a mechanism to enforce prioritization policies within the customer’s access network is also needed. Hence, this chapter proposes a cross-layer control architecture that takes advantage of the Internet resources over-provisioning and the QoS policy enforcement within access networks to facilitate rapid development of P2P applications. The design aims to alleviate the requirements of buffers and the need for adaptation on end users’ devices, thus allowing for cost-effective and rapid development of attractive services in similar hybrid content delivery networks.