Citing one of the responses from Vijay on Oct 13 "For instance, it is not ALTO
that gets to decide which peer is hosting which content and what the
contributions of that peer to the overlay are. However, it is ALTO's job to
provide information to a querying peer allowing it to determine wisely where it
will download the content from."
I agree ALTO does not determine content location but given a set of content
locations by an application would provide a ranked order of "good" peers to
download this from. However, a fundamental issue to consider is that simply
using ISP information is not enough for a querying peer to determine wisely
what to do. Unless there is a performance perspective to the goodness of peers,
is there a real incentive for applications to adopt looking up ALTO since they
anyway need to do a bunch of performance measurements. Applications typically
may be happy simply saturating download bandwidth and not much else. Providing
more information in ALTO could be a path to incentivising the users of the
service. What this more information is should be up for debate.
We should also consider the more general question of when we are designing
something for peer selection we are only designing a small piece of an
information plane for the Internet. In this context, it may be useful to have
information that can be aggregated across various applications and simply
because specific BitTorrent clients may implement some such mechanisms does not
mean that is a good design choice to leave it out of ALTO. An information plane
(see the U Wash IPlane paper) of some kind may be something to consider given
that we seem to solving only one part of the puzzle. Instead of each
application building their own proprietary and application-specific information
plane which is redundant and wasteful, such an information plane could
potentially be something ALTO provides and can be reused across a wide range of
services.
Thanks,
Saumitra Das
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