A Survey on Research on the Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) Problem

A significant part of the Internet traffic today is generated by peer-to-peer (P2P) applications used originally for file sharing, and more recently for real-time communications and live media streaming. Such applications discover a route to each other through an overlay network with little knowledge of the underlying network topology. As a result, they may choose peers based on information deduced from empirical measurements, which can lead to suboptimal choices. This document, a product of the P2P Research Group, presents a survey of existing literature on discovering and using network topology information for Application-Layer Traffic Optimization. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.