Can P2P-users benefit from locality-awareness?

Locality-awareness is considered as a promising approach to increase the efficiency of content distribution by peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, e.g., BitTorrent. It is intended to reduce the inter-domain traffic which is costly for Internet service providers (ISPs) and simultaneously increase the performance from the viewpoint of the P2P users, i.e, shorten download times. This win-win situation should be achieved by a preferred exchange of information between peers which are located closely to each other in the underlying network topology. A set of studies shows that these approaches can lead to a win-win situation under certain conditions, and to a win-no lose situation in most cases. However, the scenarios used assume mostly homogeneous peer distributions and that all peers have the same access speed. This is not the case in practice according to several measurement studies. Therefore, we extend previous work in this paper by studying scenarios with real-life, skewed peer distributions and heterogeneous access bandwidths of peers. We show that even a win-no lose situation is difficult to achieve under those conditions and that the actual impact for a specific peer depends heavily on the used locality-aware peer selection and the concrete scenario. Therefore, we conclude that current proposals need to be refined so that users of P2P networks can be sure that they also benefit from their use. Otherwise, a broad acceptance of the concept of locality-awareness in the user community of P2P networks will not take place.