The Real-time Applications & Infrastructure (RAI) Area of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will hold a workshop on P2P Infrastructure on May 28, 2008 at 50 Vassar St, Room 34-101 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA USA. They are calling for papers to be submitted before May 9.
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.
Position papers are requested from all attendees by May 9. Contact
the RAI ADs for a waiver if it is inappropriate for you to submit a
position paper. These should constitute one to five pages on the
problem or solution space of P2P architectures, with a particular
emphasis on areas that the IETF should address or revisit. Position
papers will be made publicly available. On the basis of the
position papers, a number of invited speakers will be asked to
present at the workshop. A final agenda with timeslots will be
published by May 16th. Potential attendees for whom it is not
appropriate to supply a position paper may contact the RAI ADs for
a waiver.
Evaluation of the position papers will be performed with the
assistance of a program committee consisting of the RAI ADs, Lars
Eggert (Transport AD), Danny Weitzner (MIT), John Morris (CDT), and
Dave Clark (MIT).
Further information about position paper submission procedures are
forthcoming. Interested parties are advised to subscribe to the
p2pi@ietf.org mailing listfor discussion and announcements related
to the workshop. Additional information will be available at
http://www3.tools.ietf.org/area/rai/trac/wiki/PeerToPeerInfrastructure.
