Evaluating application-layer traffic optimization cost metrics for P2P multimedia streaming

To help users of P2P communication systems perform better-than-random selection of communication peers, Internet Engineering Task Force standardized the Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) protocol. The ALTO provided data-routing cost metric, can be used to rank peers in P2P communication systems. However, the method to derive the data-routing cost metric is undefined by the standard. This paper proposes and evaluates three methods to derive the data-routing cost metric for use in ALTO servers.