BitTorrent promoting its protocol to separate P2P traffic, decongest networks

Peer-to-peer giant BitTorrent Inc. is promoting its updated protocol for managing the delivery of peer-to-peer data that it says will help Internet service providers ease network congestion. “This could be profound for the business if they understood it and operated their networks accordingly,” Eric Klinker, BitTorrent’s president and CEO, said in an interview with The Wire Report Tuesday. Known as Micro Transport Protocol (μTP), the protocol for delivering peer-to-peer data packets, attempts to identify and relieve congested traffic nodes before problems start affecting end-users, Klinker said. Before μTP’s formal release last January, most of the data sent over the Internet was delivered over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which breaks down that information into managable data packets that are sent out around the web individually and reassembled at the network end. Constantly scanning for data packets that fail to arrive at their destinations, TCP-based throttling kicks in when those problems start appearing. “This is akin to driving a car through a school zone and you don’t slow down until you’ve struck your first pedestrian,” Klinker said. BitTorrent clients are used for the majority of peer-to-peer transfers, but peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic delivered over μTP can recognize when a file-sharing download slows down below the latency threshold of 100 milliseconds, suggesting that it is drawing too heavily from congested nodes. This allows fast-moving and packet-heavy P2P traffic to give way to slower-moving and less-demanding transmissions by recognizing network congestion problems early, before users run into problems, the company says. “Some people call it a scavenger class. It uses the network if the network is available, it leaves the network alone if it is not,” Klinker said. “It basically puts up a yield sign for fast-moving traffic if a pedestrian is on the road.” Peer-to-peer users, service providers and regular Internet users can all benefit, he said, if only more people knew about the protocol. “To most in the ISP world, I’ve been talking about μTP for years now, and I still have presentations … where I talk to 7,000 people that have probably never heard of it,” he said, noting this was the case late last month when he discussed it at the Broadband World Forum in La Defence, France. From a service provider’s perspective, there is a benefit in the knowledge that μTP traffic will not add to network congestion at peak times. What this means, Klinker said, is that sophisticated network monitors could view μTP- and non μTP-based traffic separately to examine factors contributing to congestion. If an increasingly busy network received a high level of μTP-based traffic, the service provider would know that traffic would ease off as other traffic increased, he said. Investments in network upgrades could be made according to the nodes overwhelmed by normal Internet use, and not just P2P file sharing, Klinker said. “It could be very profound for the business if understood it and operated their network accordingly.” To date, Klinker said he has held conversations with a few of Canada’s service providers about how best to utilize μTP technology but that there have been “no major breakthroughs” in using it to track traffic separately. On a call with The Wire Report Monday, Ken Engelhart, vice-president of regulator affairs at Rogers Communications Inc., and David White, the company’s director of IP network engineering, said they were not familiar with the technology. Other analysts contacted by The Wire Report in recent days were also surprised to hear that μTP is already on the market. “The fact that this is up and running is a great development,” Tamir Israel, staff lawyer with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), said in an interview. Like other consumer advocates, Israel said peer-to-peer traffic has received “a bad rap” in recent years as service providers cited upload traffic as a major contributor to network capacity. He noted that peer-to-peer transmissions have decreased significantly as a proportion of overall traffic in recent years and that increasingly popular over-the-top video services will soon outpace file-sharing in terms of monthly data consumption. “I’m not really sure there’s a lot of justification left to target peer-to-peer, if there ever was,” Israel said. Engelhart said most Internet infrastructure was originally designed to serve downstream traffic and that it is burdened by upstream traffic generated through file-sharing. “The network really isn’t designed to be a 24/7 pipe running at full speed because those sort of services in telecommunications are really expensive,” Engelhart said. Peer-to-peer accounts for about half of all upload traffic and about 20 per cent of all download traffic on the Rogers network, he said. Klicker said he would like to see μTP eventually applied to Internet applications more broadly. It could help ISPs prioritize Internet traffic based on when its delivery is necessary and cope with a looming increase in traffic associated with over-the-top services and video streaming, he said. Sandvine Inc. reported in May that Netflix Inc.'s Canadian users accounted for 13.5 per cent of peak downstream traffic in Canada. The service, overall, accounted for 30 per cent of downstream traffic in North America. “If Netflix figured out a way to defer end downloads to occur overnight using μTP and to save a movie to your hard disk, you’d never have to endure another buffering evening again,” Klicker said. “Every application in the world should imagine ways they can use this protocol, and that’s only going to benefit the Internet.” Bell Canada Enterprises Inc. declined an interview request for this story. nkyonka@thewirereport.ca

BitTorrent promoting its protocol to separate P2P traffic, decongest networks

News | October 11, 2011

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