Differentiation of traffic on access networks

The Internet is facing a huge change with the increasing penetration of voice terminals and new P2P overlay networks. These changes hit hardest on access networks which need to cope simultaneously with the new stringent requirements of real-time traffic and with the increased volumes of P2P traffic. These two facts bring an urgent need for differentiation of traffic in access networks - not only downstream but also upstream. The majority of upstream traffic is composed of metafile systems, like BitTorrent and Gnutella, which distribute the file content in an overlay manner to each and every subscriber in the metafile system. This brings new challenges for handling the traffic: i) from the user perspective, co-operation within the overlay community, but still controlling the resource usage; ii) from the network provider perspective, minimal waste of scarce access network resources. We show a measurement study of differentiation of IP traffic with the goal of minimizing the delay of real-time traffic and at the same time minimizing the packet loss of P2P traffic. Our results show that proper grouping of traffic is important at both ends of the access-link.