An ALTO Service based on BGP Routing Information
University of Zurich
DOCOMO Communications
Overlay applications, like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing and video streaming, attract a lot of users and generate a huge amount of data. Most overlay applications do not take into account the underlying network topology in their routing decisions and connection establishment in general. Due to this fact and the large amount of P2P traffic, overlay applications waste network resources, cause problems in network management, and result in high costs for ISPs, especially because of the expensive interconnection links between ISPs. Therefore, the objective of the ALTO Working Group Charter [ALTO-charter] is to design and specify an Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) service that will assist P2P applications in their peer selection process in order to achieve a more efficient usage of network resources, to reduce operational costs of ISPs, and to increase the overlay application performance at the same time. This draft proposes a possible ALTO service that uses BGP routing information in order to calculate a rating value for peers providing a certain resource (resource providers). The service is operated by the ISP. Since BGP routing information is available in any ISP network and the service accesses the routing information from the local ISP network, the deployment of the service does not require changes in the network and the ALTO server can retrieve routing information automatically.