Ixia Creates Peer-to-Peer Traffic Simulation Tool

An issue largely debated nowadays on the Internet is P2P traffic management and lately ISPs like Comcast and AT&T had a big contribution “feeding” this topic since they’ve began to try out various methods of traffic management that make Web traffic for individual users much slower (namely those users who “swallow” a lot of bandwidth with their usage of P2P protocols such as BitTorrent and eDonkey).

According to Ixia, its new P2P IxLoad feature will enable ISPs to have an accurate reproduction of the influences that P2P traffic will impose on service quality for applications like voice and video services. The usual process goes like this: “fat” data files are distributed through P2P technology by being fragmented and then sent using multiple sources. This is a two-sided matter: on one hand this method of file sharing proves to be much faster and works much better than having a single centralized server to rely on, on the other hand it may also impede traffic management for ISPs since P2P protocols are first and foremost developed to download large data files from sources (wherever they can get them), paying little interest to network efficiency.

P2P is a key requirement for IxLoad, because P2P changes the game for ISPs,” says Ixia product manager Sashi Jeyaretnam. “If you think about all the assumptions that ISPs made when they built their networks, P2P defies them all. They didn’t expect P2P protocols to be on all time, and they didn’t expect P2P uploads to be so large.

Basically, what IxLoad does is create P2P traffic simulation by employing P2P application replay capabilities and a library of different P2P traffic flow signatures. This way, says Ixia, ISPs can determine precisely the levels of their networks performance when confronted with different levels of P2P pressure intensity, and can develop improved traffic management policies due to a more precise assessment than P2P measurement tools that are using only capture/replay methods.

Once ISPs know the amount of P2P traffic that is traversing their network, they can simulate the amount of bandwidth they’ll need for applications like voice and video,” says Jeyaretnam. “Then they can measure the quality of experience users will have with that much P2P traffic on the network. That way, they can give their subscribers and business customers better guarantees for the quality of service they can expect.