Improving ICE Service Selection in a P2P System using the Gradient Topology

Internet connectivity establishment (ICE) is becoming increasingly important for P2P systems on the open Internet, as it enables NAT-bound peers to provide accessible services. A problem for P2P systems that provide ICE services is how peers discover good quality ICE servers for NAT traversal, that is, the TURN and STUN servers that provide relaying and hole-punching services, respectively. Skype provides a P2P-based solution to this problem, where super-peers provide ICE services. However, experimental analysis of Skype indicates that peers perform a random walk of super-peers to find one with an acceptable round-trip latency. In this paper, we discuss a self-organizing approach to discovering good quality ICE servers in a P2P system based the walk topology. The walk topology uses information about each peer's ability to provide ICE services (open IP address, available bandwidth and expected session times) to construct a topology where the "better" peers for providing ICE services cluster in the center of the topology; this adaptation of the super-peer search space reduces the problem of finding a good quality ICE server from a random walk to a gradient ascent search.