P4P Architecture

We design a seminal and novel framework, now known as P4P, to allow ISP-compliant applications and cooperations of ISPs and applications; established the theoretical foundations for P4P and the detailed system and protocol design.

In P4P, we design and implement a general P4P architecture consisting of the iTracker and the appTracker which jointly accomplish the P4P objectives; customize the P4P implementation for P2P file-sharing and streaming applications. We also design and implement system interfaces/APIs for existing application systems’ adoption of P4P; the implemented system was tested by approximately one million of real Internet subscribers.

Our P4P results in the most prestigious academic conference, ACM SIGCOMM, in 2008. Since its publication, the paper has been the most frequently cited paper among all papers published in the same conference in the same year.

P4P was applauded as a “turning point in the history of peer-to-peer technology and ISPs” , was cited by FCC commissioner Robert M. McDowell as one example that “the government should encourage collaborative private sector solutions” , and was cited by FCC commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate as “the best way to serve the public interest and thus ensure an open internet for all consumers”.

P4P was reported by 1700+ times by world-wide press.

1. H. Xie, Y. R. Yang, A. Krishnamurthy, Y. G. Liu, and A. Silberschatz, “P4P: Provider portal for applications,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 Conference on Data Communication, ser. SIGCOMM ’08, Seattle, WA, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2008, pp. 351–362, isbn: 9781605581750. doi: 10.1145/1402958.1402999.

2. H. Xie, Y. R. Yang, and A. Silberschatz, “Towards an isp-compliant, peer-friendly design for peer-to-peer networks,” in NETWORKING 2008 Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Wireless Networks, Next Generation Internet, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2008, pp. 375–384, isbn: 978-3-540-79549-0.

3. H. Xie, B. Min, and Y. Dai, “SODA: Towards a framework for self optimization via demand adaptation in peer-to-peer networks,” in 2009 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, 2009, pp. 163–170. doi: 10.1109/P2P.2009.5284510.

P4P-ALTO Experimental Studies

We successfully led the large-scale, world-wide, million-user experiments with tier-1 ISPs such as Verizon and Telefonica, and AT&T, Bell Canada, Comcast, and Verizon; demonstrated that P4P can significantly improvement the performance of both ISPs and P2P applications.

Tier-1 ISPs including Verizon and AT&T formally announced their adoption of and support for P4P; Tier-1 ISPs also filed to FCC a formal petition which proposes to replace the net neutrality requirement with the P4P framework.

1. J. Ni, H. Xie, S. Tatikonda, and Y. R. Yang, “Network routing topology inference from end-to-end measurements,” in IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications, 2008, pp. 36–40. doi: 10.1109/INFOCOM.2008.16.

2. H. Xie and Y. R. Yang, “A measurement-based study of the Skype Peer-to-Peer VoIP performance,” in 6th International workshop on Peer-To-Peer Systems (IPTPS 2007), Bellevue, WA, USA, Feb. 2007.

P4P Standardization

P4P directly promoted founding of the P4P Working Group (P4PWG), together with Verizon and Pando Networks, under the umbrella of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA). The P4PWG is co-chaired by Verizon Communications, Inc. and Pando Networks, Inc.

P4PWG grows to become the largest and the most influential organization focusing on P2P and P4P research, development, and standardization. Its members include prestigious research institutes (e.g., Yale Univ., Princeton Univ., AT&T Research, Bell Labs), major ISPs (e.g., AT&T, Comcast, Telefonica, Verizon), and major P2P applications (e.g., BitTorrent, Joost, Pando)

A direct result of the P4P framework is that the Internet standard organization, IETF, created a special working group, the Application-Level Traffic Optimization Working Group – ALTO WG, to create standards for regulating application traffic in the P4P way; P4P beat Cisco’s NPS and became the cornerstone framework/protocol for ALTO WG.

Mobile Networks

1. Z. Yao, S. Chen, J. Yang, Y. Liu, and H. Xie, “Mobility-aware pre-caching based on unsupervised deep generative model for small cell networks,” in 2019 13th International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication Systems (ICSPCS), 2019, pp. 1–7. doi: 10.1109/ICSPCS47537.2019.9008496.

2. H. Hao, C. Xu, M. Wang, H. Xie, Y. Liu, and D. O. Wu, “Knowledge-centric proactive edge caching over mobile content distribution network,” in IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS), 2018, pp. 450–455. doi: 10.1109/INFCOMW.2018.8406950.