Peer to peer multicast: an infrastructure for dynamically trading network resources

The increasing demand for broadband services in the Internet will create a network bandwidth shortage and severely limit the capability to broadcast rich media in the Internet. A key impediment for broadband deployment is that there is no universal support for IP multicast in the Internet, because of several difficulties ranging from scalability problems to the accounting of network traffic and the enforcement of quality of service to subscribers. Also, measures that regulate the amount of traffic that can be generated from a given publisher such as committed access rate (CAR) agreements will severely limit the amount of data that can be published by a given node. In this paper, a new framework is discussed which dynamically builds an application level multicast network employing the peer nodes of a given application as network routers, thus greatly reducing the network bandwidth requirements for data broadcast. The paper discusses the current measures of network traffic accounting currently employed by Internet service providers and shows how the peer to peer model can circumvent several of the limitations of the present day Internet.