Cooperative proxy caching for peer-to-peer traffic

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems currently generate a major fraction of the total Internet traffic, accounting for as much as 60-70% of the traffic in some ISPs. We analyze the potential of cooperative proxy caching for P2P traffic as a means to ease the burden imposed by P2P traffic on ISPs. We perform trace-based simulations to demonstrate: (i) significant improvement in byte hit rate can be achieved using cooperative caching, (ii) simple object replacement policies are sufficient to achieve that gain, and (iii) the overhead imposed by cooperative caching is indeed negligible. In addition, using our analytical model, we confirm that substantial gains from cooperative caching are attainable under wide ranges of traffic and network characteristics. Finally, we propose a P2P proxy cache system for ISPs and enterprise networks to improve traffic locality. We assume that our proxy cache being deployed at the edge of an ISP, executed on the gateway server.