IETF P2P Workshop announced for May 28, 2008 in Boston
April 23rd, 2008 by Dan York
It’s hard these days to escape news about peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and the concerns raised by service providers about those P2P apps. With recent FCC hearings about Comcast “delaying” P2P traffic, the topic is getting a great amount of discussion across the blogosphere and in the media in general. To look at the issue from a technical point-of-view and see if there are technical solutions that could help in the area, the IETF recently announced a “workshop on P2P Infrastructure” to be held on May 28th on the campus of MIT in the Boston area.
From a voice perspective, any kind of latency / delay is something to be avoided at all costs. As researchers look at P2P SIP as a future deployment model, getting the infrastructure right is a key factor in the future success of P2P SIP. Now, serious deployments of P2P SIP won’t happen for some time now (probably a few years), but the reality is that it will also take some time for any technical solutions to: 1) work their way through IETF; 2) be incorporated into vendor equipment; and 3) actually be deployed in service provider networks. So now is really a good time to get started.
If you are interested in P2P applications in general and are in the Boston area (or can get there), please do consider attending this workshop. There is a wiki page for the workshop that will be updated as the workshop gets closer and a ‘p2pi’ mailing list that is open to anyone to join.
Here is part of the announcement that explains what the workshop will be about:
The Real-time Applications & Infrastructure (RAI) Area Directors, Jon Peterson and Cullen Jennings, would like to announce an IETF workshop on P2P Infrastructure to be held on May 28, 2008 at 50 Vassar St, Room 34-101 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA USA.
Several large ISPs have encountered issues with P2P traffic. The transfer of static, delay-tolerant data between nodes on the Internet is a well-understood problem, but traditional management of fairness at the transport level has largely been circumvented by applications designed to achieve the best end-user transfer rates. This results, at peak times, in networks running near absolute capacity, and in which all traffic incurs delays; the applications that bear the brunt of this additional latency are real-time applications like VoIP and Internet gaming. This has led to need for further discussion of the proper approaches to P2P application development, and infrastructure management in environments where P2P is commonly used. This workshop intends to discover where additional IETF standards work is needed, or existing work might be reapplied, to alleviate these difficulties. In particular, the workshop will draw on the experiences of Comcast and BitTorrent, representatives of both of whom will present their perspectives on the problem space.
Example solution discussions might include, but are not limited to: deployment of application servers or caches to reduce network load; new rendez-vous mechanisms to optimize P2P network topology; enabling applications to signal their bandwidth needs (and priority or lack thereof) to networks; enabling networks to signal bandwidth constraints to elastic and inelastic applications; and, new approaches to fairness that are coupled with incentives for applications. Contributions from subject matter experts in the problem and solution space are welcome. The primary outcome should be a direction for one or more IETF efforts exploring the best practices for addressing these challenges.
The organizers would like to stress that this is a technical workshop exploring engineering issues and practices. The public policy implications of P2P applications are not in the scope of this workshop.
If you would like more information about how to participate in the workshop, please read the full announcement.
Technorati Tags: ietf, standards, p2p, peer-to-peer, p2psip, sip, voip, comcast, bittorrent, Internet, networking
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May 20th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
[...] I wrote about previously, the IETF is hosting a “P2P Infrastructure Workshop” next week on May 28th on the MIT [...]