Exploiting overlays for practical and profitable traffic attraction

The Internet is heading towards efficiency with the continued deployment of technologies such as Content Distribution Networks (CDN) and with the introduction of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) localization. These technologies reduce the amount of costly traffic that ISPs must send to other ISPs. While these advances will undoubtedly cause many residential ISPs to gain profit, the transit ISPs that carry traffic for them will actually lose revenue. In this work, we identify different means by which transit ISPs can increase revenue by subverting CDN and P2P systems and thus causing traffic to flow through them on profitable paths. We evaluate how profitable such techniques are by collecting datasets from the popular BitTorrent P2P system and the world-wide Akamai CDN. We find that many ISPs are able to at least double their profitable P2P or CDN traffic, while some can increase it many more times.