With traffic on the Internet growing by nearly 100% every 18 months, a new EU-funded project is working on developing an improved traffic management system that can meet users' increasing demand for music, films and photos.

Currently, most of this traffic is created by overlay network-based applications such as peer-to-peer applications. These function in a different way from the traditional 'client-server' paradigm, relying instead on equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both 'clients' and 'servers' to the other nodes on the network.

As the paradigm shifts from services offered on a centralised basis to services offered by end-nodes, the EU-funded SmoothIT project intends to be at the forefront of the evolution. It will structure overlays in the best possible way for the communities of users as well as for telecommunication service providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

To achieve this goal, the project will use incentives to control and manage network traffic for overlay Internet applications. The project will study and define key requirements for a commercial application of Economic Traffic Management (ETM) schemes for these Telecommunication Service Providers and Internet Service Providers.

Then, in order to advance the traffic management system beyond traditional limits, the project will seek to develop a specialised economic theory. This will be applied to the building of a fully decentralised network efficient enough to provide Internet-based overlay services in many different domain scenarios, thus solving the problem of information asymmetry.

Finally, SmoothIT will design, prototype, and validate the necessary networking infrastructure and components for an efficient implementation of such economic traffic management mechanisms in a testbed and trial network.

The 'Simple Economic Management Approaches OF Overlay Traffic to Heterogeneous Internet Topologies' project will run for three years, and receive €4.4 million from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

SmoothIT project website

Source: Community R&D Information Service (CORDIS)