NetEqualizer News Blog

By Art Reisman

Editor’s note: Art Reisman is the CTO of APconnections. APconnections designs and manufactures the popular NetEqualizer bandwidth shaper.

If you are an IT professional interested in the ethical treatment of P2P (which we define as keeping it in check without invading the privacy of your customers by looking at their private data), you’ll appreciate our next generation approach to containing P2P usage. Thanks to some key input by a leading-edge ISP in South Africa, we have developed a next-generation P2P control that balances the resources of an ISP, and yet allows their end customers to use Bittorent without bringing down the network.

First a quick review of how P2P affects a network

A signature of a typical P2P user is that they can open hundreds of small connections while downloading files. A P2P client, such as Kazaa, is designed to find as many sources to a file as possible. For efficiency and speed, P2P clients operate as multi-threaded download engines, where each download stream captures a different segment of the requested file. When all the segments are complete they are re-assembled into a complete usable media file on your hard drive. The multiple downloads cause a strain on network bandwidth resources. They also create extreme overhead on wireless routers. Extreme P2P usage by just a subset of users can crowd out web pages, VoIP, YouTube and many other less aggressive applications.

Current P2P Limiting Solution: Connection Limits

Our current generation of P2P control involves intelligently looking at the number of connections generated from a user on your network. Based on the persistence and number of connections, we can reliably tell if a user is currently using P2P. The current P2P remedy, deployed on our NetEqualizer equipment, involves limiting the number of connections of suspected P2P users; this works well to limit p2p usage.  Thus, it keeps the P2P users from overwhelming a shared network.

Next-Generation P2P Limiting: Smart Connection Limits

While we have retained the connection-limiting aspects of our current P2P limiting technology, our new technology goes a step further. With Smart Connection Limits, limiting is done by also slowly starving the P2P connections for bandwidth. The bandwidth reduction is based on a formula which takes into a account two main factors:

1) the number of connections a user has open.
2) the load on the network.

I like to think of this technology as more of a “reward system”, resulting in a higher quality of service for non-P2P users.  In this case, the reward is that non-P2P users’ connections are not experiencing this reduction in bandwidth (although they may get equalized on any connection that is hogging bandwidth).  P2P users will slowly see less bandwidth allocated to their P2P traffic, which should discourage them from using P2P on your network.  Basically, this helps to train them to use better behavior – sharing the network resource more fairly with others.

This philosophyof fairness is aligned with the primary goal of the NetEqualizer – to ensure fairness for all network users. It follows that if a user has 20 concurrent streams and another user only has 5, to ensure equal  use of bandwidth under network load, the user with 20 streams should have his streams operate at 1/4 the speed of the user that has 5. While you may configure Smart Connection Limits at various levels, you could enforce the example indicated above.

The reason this technology is important is that, on a network pressed for bandwidth, the P2P users are often taking an unfair share. Even with basic rate caps per user in place, you often must augment that restriction by limiting the total number of connections per user. And now with our latest technology, we also temporarily restrict the bandwidth per connection (only applied to the P2P users).

If you are interested in learning more about Smart Connection Limits, to see if they are a fit for your network, contact us.

Some common questions and answers:

Is it possible to completely block P2P?

It is never safe to try to completely block p2p for a couple of reasons.

1) Although it is always possible to identify P2P, it is often expensive and not foolproof. To block it based on hearsay will cause problems. Our solution, although targeted on limiting P2P, focuses on the resource footprint of the P2P user, and does not attempt to outright block types of traffic. In other words, whether or not the traffic is actually P2P is not the issue. The issue is, is this user abusing resources? If yes, they get punished.

2) Devices that attempt to identify P2P traffic often use a technique called deep packet inspection (DPI), which is frowned upon as an invasion of privacy.  Additionally, we are finding that the latest P2P tools (such as utorrent) encrypt P2P streams as their default behavior, which defeats deep packet inspection.  Not so with our solutions; both Connection Limits and Smart Connection Limits will throttle encrypted P2P traffic.

Who do we recommend move from Connection Limits to Smart Connection Limits ?

If you are in a business where you charge for bandwidth usage (ISP, WISP, satellite provider), you should consider implementing Smart Connection Limits.  We also recommend looking at Smart Connection Limits if you have repeat offenders – basically, the same users are consistently running P2P traffic on your network and you want to change their behavior.

Can I continue using the Connection Limits or do I need to move to Smart Connection Limits?

Both solutions to Limit P2P traffic are being supported. If you do not have a lot of P2P traffic on your network, you may opt to stay with Connection Limits, as a quick-and-easy implementation. Smart Connection Limits take a little more thought to implement and have additional complexity, which you may not wish to take on at this point.