Good morning,

I am currently doing investigative work regarding the ALTO protocol for my 
master's degree. I've been getting acquainted with the ALTO protocol and the 
problems it tries to solve via reading of the RFCs and drafts that have been 
published, but I've struggled to find a question to the following - does the 
ALTO system as a whole have a plan on how to guarantee that the clients act in 
good faith with the information they receive?

 In particular, consider that a P2P application wishes to have ALTO guidance to 
pick between a number of potential number of peers, and thus queries for a 
multi-cost map for the pairs (source_pid, destination_pid) whose throughput and 
one-way-delay values are within a certain criteria. Is there anything 
preventing said client to then not prefer the pair whose routing cost is 
lowest? It would make sense that the ALTO server would prefer that the client 
would "be kind" and cooperate with the ISP and use the information in a way 
that is mutually beneficial, but what if the client only cares about client 
performance?

I can only imagine one of the following solutions - there being some incentive 
mechanism, restricting the information to trustworthy partners, or deliberately 
manipulating non-routing-cost metric values to steer clients into a certain 
choice. The latter seems problematic as it breaks the transparency in layer 
cooperation and might damage the entire reason the system was created to begin 
with.

Is there any work done in regards to ensuring client cooperative behavior?

Kind regards,

Paulo Caldas
_______________________________________________
alto mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto

Reply via email to