Differentiation of traffic on access networks

Internet is facing a huge change with the increasing penetration of voice terminals and new P2P overlay networks. These changes hit on their hardest to access networks which on the same time need to cope with new stringent requirements of real-time traffic and increased volumes of P2P traffic. These two facts bring urgent need for differentiation of traffic in access networks - not only downstream but also upstream. Majority of upstream traffic is metafile systems like BitTorrent and Gnutella which distribute the file content in overlay manner to each and every subscriber in metafile system. This brings new challenges for handling the traffic: i) from the user perspective, co-operation within the overlay community but still controlling the resource usage, and ii) from the network provider perspective, minimal waste of scarce access network resources. We show a measurement study of differentiation of IP traffic with goal to minimize the delay of real-time traffic and at the same time to minimize the packet loss of P2P traffic. Our results show that proper grouping of traffic is important at both ends of accesslink.