ALTO: A Multi Dimensional Peer Selection Problem

Bulk data applications are posing serious challenges to the Internet infrastructure and more mass adoption of such applications would only increase that challenge. P2P bulk data applications and other large volume HTTP traffic such as video currently dominate the Internet traffic. These applications do not generally benefit from the traffic engineering techniques developed for the Internet. In the HTTP traffic case, the traffic optimization issues are often addressed using the CDN infrastructure. For P2P bulk data applications, the problem is about picking the right peers to communicate with and the criteria for doing this vary greatly based on the application. Hence, intelligent peer selection is the fundamental problem to address for these applications. This document explains the multiple dimensions of the peer selection problem with respect to obtaining information from the network as well from other peers and argues for an integrated, common framework to share such information.