In discussions about P2P (peer-to-peer) traffic, there are widely divergent views on what people's inherent rights are when it comes to sharing Internet capacity.
In designing TCP/IP and the Internet over 40 years ago, no rule was made as to how capacity was distributed at each choke point, but the result was "equal capacity (rate) per flow." This most likely reflected our concept of voice networks. Also, in the early years there really was typically just one flow in each direction per person (used for file transfers, voice calls, typing streams, etc.).
Now, however, computers can divide any single flow, such as a file transfer, into many flows with ease. So if we stick with "equal capacity per flow," the only way for each user to get his fair share is to use more and more flows per application.
Outconsuming your neighbor to get what you need will only lead to an arms race that will cause performance problems for a large part of the population.
For example, because of the inherent properties of P2P, we now see a small fraction (under 5 percent) of users consuming 80 to 95 percent of all network capacity with P2P applications. The rest of us are slowed to a crawl, since our one flow gets the same capacity as each of the many flows allotted to each P2P application.
And P2P applications are almost insatiable. If more capacity is added, P2P takes an even higher fraction of the bandwidth. Currently, there is enough video out there to give P2P applications a virtually unlimited appetite.
Economically, P2P is not egalitarian. Where people are charged a flat rate for Internet access, those not using P2P may be getting far less capacity, and far poorer performance, for the same price as P2P users. This is not an ideal situation for the users, or for service providers or organizations with networks that are compromised by P2P.
Thus, it is time to change the network design to one that inherently supports the concept of "equal capacity for equal payment." The current flow equality is a joint result of the design of TCP and the network. Changing TCP is unworkable and unenforceable. Changing the network turns out to be quite economical and straightforward.
The change only needs to be implemented at the network edge, where each subscriber's traffic can be seen. Network equipment is always controlling the rate of every TCP flow -- today, by making all flows equal in rate. Alternatively, when network equipment measures the traffic per subscriber, this information can be used to control each subscriber's flow rates separately, such that in any short period they all receive equitable capacity for what they pay.
[Ed. note: Dr. Lawrence Roberts is the founder and CEO of Anagran Inc. , a flow-based routing company.]
With network equipment that has been designed to manage overload through flow rate control rather than random packet loss, managing subscriber traffic and honoring SLAs based on subscribed usage rates becomes straightforward.
P2P traffic is just the first of a wave of applications that get more capacity by using multiple flows. We need to change the old concept of "equal capacity per flow" to "equal capacity for equal pay" -- or the arms race for more and more flows will hurt us all.
One of the possible solutions for dealing the internet traffic jam is making use of network coding. Network coding is a feild of coding which helps in achieving this goal. It can help in using the network resources more effeciently resulting in the reduction of delays for users which ultimately can help in reducing traffic jams. . Researchers have been digging up network coding from past few years. It has been shown that network coding can help in reducing traffic jams alongwith acheiving robustness, security and maximizing throughput.
This feild was first introduced in a paper by R. W. Yeung and Z. Zhang. But the term `network coding' was used in a subsequent paper by R. Ahlswede, N. Cai, S.-Y. R. Li and R. W. Yeung in 2000, where this idea was formally explored. Network coidng has found its ways into many feilds like internet, sensor network, P2P file sharing, unicast and multicast wireless networks etc.
The core idea of network coding is to allow mixing of data at intermediate network nodes. A receiver sees these data packets and deduces from them the messages that were originally intended for that data sink. Network coding gurantees to achieve the maxium possible through using max-flow min-cut theorm. Unfortunately finding optimal network coding solution is NP-complete. Reserchers are doing great jobs to somehow exploit this technique by using some polinimial time, LP solutions or heuristic.
P2P isn't inherently stoppable. There have been only mild attempts to relay and encrypt file sharing technology, because of the internet's "neutrality" towards packets. However it is surely on the horizon.
Any blocking or filtering technology that becomes prevalent will simply yield a new type of P2P that bypasses the limitation. I would think that the Web -> Napster -> Morpheus -> Gnutella -> Bittorrent evolution would demonstrate that pirates are more flexible than lawyers and network architects.
Bandwidth limits would do the job nicely.... until someone creates malware designed to chew up a user's paid bandwidth, and an ISP is held accountable for their Denial-of-Service policy.
Personally, I can easily imagine meshes of amateur internets -- possibly connected to, but operationally independent of "The Internet." At this point, the technology is widely available -- and more importantly, cheap -- to create sophisticated internetworks. It's unfathomable that someone, somewhere isn't forging a "parrallel universe" for people who disdain the authoritarian nature of the internet as it is currently evolving.
Today AT&T said it will block P2P to try to solve their "congestion problem" and in another news the UK record industry made a deal with the ISPs to spy and degrade the service of subscribers accused of downloading illegal content.
Do you think that will solve the problem? or that people are so stubborn about stealing that they'll look for some other protocol and even more underground techniques to obtain it?
Yes I do tell it like it is. Anything else is, well...boring and superficial (and civil...yawn [guffaw]). I'm not a music industry expert, but I have always heard that very few artists make decent $$$ by touring. Maybe Hannah Montana (lol) does w/ her $1000 tickets. Well...get it while it's hot ya bucked teeth, skinny legged, "Go Girl." It's expensive - hotels, meals, buses, air fare, semis hauling the equipment, roadies, drugs, booze, etc etc. Or...go into the studio once, cut a record...then sell a few million copies. Which is more lucrative (even with the economic trickle down to the artists in the record industry)? I'd say the latter.
Humor is key to sanity.
Ahhh...I see the hat/6gun link - albeit, pure coincidence.
I see you tell it like how it is, not how it ought to be.
I recall someone saying "Industry rule number 480, record company people are SHADY" - I don't think it's the artists that hurt from giving away their copyright material as more people turn out for their shows and they likely embrace ubiquity first revenue later concept.
I'm right here jwallace. I don't have any split personalities in either world...yet (cyber or the "real" world). Extreme? Me? Is that what ppl think? Ha ha. I'd agree w/ Mike Acker w/ one respect though - as much as I hate all those liberal, free wheeling, happy go lucky, dope smoking, good time rock & rollers (musicians), and those liberal, free wheeling, happy go lucky, cokehead, good time plastic pretenders (Hollywood), I do think that sharing copyrighted material w/o paying for it is...(hold onto to yer skate rat hat; doesn't imply anything, the best snide comment I could come up with this am) is...STEALING.
As far as advertising on the net, that doesn’t bother me (well the Ads do) and is what really keeps the net alive ($$$). As people must breathe, corporations must make $ (even if they p1ss me off with all their stoopit FLASH advertising…eww).
I'm sure though, if the shoe was on the other foot Mr. Wallace, that you would LOVE to give all your copyrighted material away, free, at no charge to all the P2P thieves out there...so you could then supplement your income (or less income from lower sales of your material) by doing something else? As far as P2P goes (like so many things in this Grey world of ours), it's a double edged sword and I’m all for it (in a perverse sort of way). Until the Feds can crack down on these illegal file sharers, P2P can blow up and compromise OSs, then I can supplement MY income by repairing them.
That's a definite improvement, and one that Cable providers will have trouble matching because their shared bandwidth is much smaller and shared with fewer and is more prone to congestion.
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There has been widespread discussion lately about the unfairness of the primary protocol we rely on with the Internet – Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) – along with many proposals on how to fix it. Since there are clearly many problems with both slow and unfair service, my question is: Should TCP be overhauled to fix today’s congestion control problem, or does the network itself need fixing?
The Internet has some major problems. The big one involves the cost of supporting the amount of content and services being supplied over the Internet infrastructure. And if it's not fixed soon, the expansion of Internet traffic could outrun our ability to pay for it.
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