Cache capacity allocation for BitTorrent-like systems to minimize inter-ISP traffic

Many Internet service providers (ISPs) have deployed peer-to-peer (P2P) caches in their networks in order to decrease costly inter-ISP traffic. A P2P cache stores parts of the most popular contents locally, and if possible serves the requests of local peers to decrease the inter-ISP traffic. Traditionally, P2P cache resource management focuses on managing the storage resource of the cache so as to maximize the inter-ISP traffic savings. In this paper we show that when there are many overlays competing for the upload bandwidth of a P2P cache then in order to maximize the inter-ISP traffic savings the cache's upload bandwidth should be actively allocated among the overlays. We formulate the problem of P2P cache bandwidth allocation as a Markov decision process, and describe two approximations to the optimal cache bandwidth allocation policy. Based on the insights obtained from the approximate policies we propose SRP, a priority-based allocation policy for BitTorrent-like P2P systems. We use extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed policies, and show that cache bandwidth allocation can improve the inter-ISP traffic savings by up to 30 to 60 percent. We validate the results via BitTorrent experiments on Planet-lab.