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ALTO Deployment Considerations
draft-ietf-alto-deployments-09

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 7971.
Authors Martin Stiemerling , Sebastian Kiesel , Stefano Previdi , Michael Scharf
Last updated 2014-02-13
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draft-ietf-alto-deployments-09
ALTO                                                 M. Stiemerling, Ed.
Internet-Draft                                           NEC Europe Ltd.
Intended status: Informational                            S. Kiesel, Ed.
Expires: August 15, 2014                         University of Stuttgart
                                                              S. Previdi
                                                                   Cisco
                                                               M. Scharf
                                                Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs
                                                       February 11, 2014

                     ALTO Deployment Considerations
                     draft-ietf-alto-deployments-09

Abstract

   Many Internet applications are used to access resources such as
   pieces of information or server processes that are available in
   several equivalent replicas on different hosts.  This includes, but
   is not limited to, peer-to-peer file sharing applications.  The goal
   of Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) is to provide
   guidance to applications that have to select one or several hosts
   from a set of candidates, which are able to provide a desired
   resource.  This memo discusses deployment related issues of ALTO.  It
   addresses different use cases of ALTO such as peer-to-peer file
   sharing and CDNs, security considerations, recommendations for
   network administrators, and also guidance for application designers
   using ALTO.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on August 15, 2014.

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  General Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.1.  ALTO Entities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
       2.1.1.  Baseline Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
       2.1.2.  Placement of ALTO Entities  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.2.  Classification of Deployment Scenarios  . . . . . . . . .   6
       2.2.1.  Deployment Degrees of Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
       2.2.2.  Information Exposure  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       2.2.3.  More Advanced Deployments . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   3.  Deployment Considerations by ISPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     3.1.  Objectives for the Guidance to Applications . . . . . . .   9
       3.1.1.  General Objectives for Traffic Optimization . . . . .  10
       3.1.2.  Inter-Network Traffic Localization  . . . . . . . . .  11
       3.1.3.  Intra-Network Traffic Localization  . . . . . . . . .  12
       3.1.4.  Network Off-Loading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
       3.1.5.  Application Tuning  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
     3.2.  Provisioning of ALTO Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
       3.2.1.  Data Sources  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
       3.2.2.  Privacy Requirements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
       3.2.3.  Map Partitioning and Grouping . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
       3.2.4.  Rating Criteria and/or Cost Calculation . . . . . . .  18
     3.3.  Known Limitations of ALTO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21
       3.3.1.  Limitations of Map-based Approaches . . . . . . . . .  21
       3.3.2.  Limitiations of Non-Map-based Approaches  . . . . . .  23
     3.4.  Monitoring the Performance of ALTO  . . . . . . . . . . .  23
       3.4.1.  Supervising the Benefits of ALTO  . . . . . . . . . .  23
       3.4.2.  How to Monitor ALTO Performance . . . . . . . . . . .  23
       3.4.3.  Monitoring Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  25
     3.5.  Map Examples for Different Types of ISPs  . . . . . . . .  26
       3.5.1.  Small ISP with Single Internet Uplink . . . . . . . .  26
       3.5.2.  ISP with Several Fixed Access Networks  . . . . . . .  28

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       3.5.3.  ISP with Fixed and Mobile Network . . . . . . . . . .  29
     3.6.  Deployment Experiences  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  30
   4.  Using ALTO for P2P Traffic Optimization . . . . . . . . . . .  31
     4.1.  Overview  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  31
       4.1.1.  Usage Scenario  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  31
       4.1.2.  Applicability of ALTO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  31
     4.2.  Deployment Recommendations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  34
       4.2.1.  ALTO Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  35
       4.2.2.  Guidance Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  35
   5.  Using ALTO for CDNs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  37
     5.1.  Overview  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  37
       5.1.1.  Usage Scenario  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  37
       5.1.2.  Applicability of ALTO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  39
     5.2.  Deployment Recommendations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  40
       5.2.1.  ALTO Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  40
       5.2.2.  Guidance Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  41
   6.  Other Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  43
     6.1.  Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) . . . . . . . . . . . . .  43
     6.2.  In-Network Caching  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  45
     6.3.  Other Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  46
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  46
     7.1.  Information Leakage from the ALTO Server  . . . . . . . .  46
     7.2.  ALTO Server Access  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  47
     7.3.  Faking ALTO Guidance  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  47
   8.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  48
   9.  Conclusion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  48
   10. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  48
     10.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  48
     10.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  48
   Appendix A.  Contributing Authors and Acknowledgments . . . . . .  50
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  51

1.  Introduction

   Many Internet applications are used to access resources such as
   pieces of information or server processes that are available in
   several equivalent replicas on different hosts.  This includes, but
   is not limited to, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing applications and
   Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).  The goal of Application-Layer
   Traffic Optimization (ALTO) is to provide guidance to applications
   that have to select one or several hosts from a set of candidates,
   which are able to provide a desired resource.  The basic ideas and
   problem space of ALTO is described in [RFC5693] and the set of
   requirements is discussed in [RFC6708].

   However, there are no considerations about what operational issues
   are to be expected once ALTO will be deployed.  This includes, but is

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   not limited to, location of the ALTO server, imposed load to the ALTO
   server, or from whom the queries are performed.

   Comments and discussions about this memo should be directed to the
   ALTO working group: alto@ietf.org.

2.  General Considerations

2.1.  ALTO Entities

2.1.1.  Baseline Scenario

   The ALTO protocol [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol] is a client/server
   protocol, operating between a number of ALTO clients and an ALTO
   server, as sketched in Figure 1.

                 +----------+
                 |  ALTO    |
                 |  Server  |
                 +----------+
                       ^
                _.-----|------.
            ,-''       |       `--.
          ,'           |           `.
         (     Network |             )
          `.           |           ,'
            `--.       |       _.-'
                `------|-----''
                       v
    +----------+  +----------+   +----------+
    |  ALTO    |  |  ALTO    |...|  ALTO    |
    |  Client  |  |  Client  |   |  Client  |
    +----------+  +----------+   +----------+

        Figure 1: Baseline Deployment Scenario of the ALTO Protocol

2.1.2.  Placement of ALTO Entities

   The ALTO server and ALTO clients can be situated at various entities
   in a network deployment.  The first differentiation is whether the
   ALTO client is located on the actual host that runs the application,
   as shown in Figure 2, or if the ALTO client is located on a resource
   directory, as shown in Figure 3.

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                                                  +-----+
                                             =====|     |**
                                         ====     +-----+  *
                                     ====            *     *
                                 ====                *     *
        +-----+     +------+=====                 +-----+  *
        |     |.....|      |======================|     |  *
        +-----+     +------+=====                 +-----+  *
      Source of      ALTO        ====                *     *
      topological    service         ====            *     *
      information                        ====     +-----+  *
                                             =====|     |**
                                                  +-----+
      Legend:
      === ALTO client protocol
      *** Application protocol
      ... Provisioning protocol

     Figure 2: Overview of protocol interaction between ALTO elements
                       without a resource directory

   Figure 2 shows the operational model for applications that do not use
   a resouce directory.  An example would be a peer-to-peer file sharing
   application that does not use a tracker, such as edonkey.

                                                  +-----+
                                                **|     |**
                                              **  +-----+  *
                                            **       *     *
                                          **         *     *
        +-----+     +------+     +-----+**        +-----+  *
        |     |.....|      |=====|     |**********|     |  *
        +-----+     +------+     +-----+**        +-----+  *
      Source of      ALTO        Resource **         *     *
      topological    service     directory  **       *     *
      information                             **  +-----+  *
                                                **|     |**
                                                  +-----+

      Legend:
      === ALTO client protocol
      *** Application protocol
      ... Provisioning protocol

   Figure 3: Overview of protocol interaction between ALTO elements with
                           a resource directory

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   In Figure 3, a use case with a resource directory is illustrated,
   e.g., a tracker in peer-to-peer filesharing.  Both deployment
   scenarios may differ in the number of ALTO clients that access an
   ALTO service: If ALTO clients are implemented in a resource
   directory, ALTO servers may be accessed by a limited and less dynamic
   set of clients, whereas in the general case any host could be an ALTO
   client.  This use case is further detailed in Section 4.

   Using ALTO in CDNs may be similar to a resource directory
   [I-D.jenkins-alto-cdn-use-cases].  The ALTO server can also be
   queried by CDN entities to get a guidance about where the a
   particular client accessing data in the CDN is exactly located in the
   ISP's network, as discussed in Section 5.

2.2.  Classification of Deployment Scenarios

2.2.1.  Deployment Degrees of Freedom

   ALTO is a general-purpose solution and it is intended to be used by a
   wide range of applications.  This implies that there are different
   possibilities where the ALTO entities are actually located, i.e., if
   the ALTO clients and the ALTO server are in the same ISP's domain, or
   if the clients and the ALTO server are managed/owned/located in
   different domains.

   ALTO deployments can be differentiated e.g. according to the
   following aspects:

   1.  Applicable trust model: The deployment of ALTO can differ
       depending on whether ALTO client and ALTO server are operated
       within the same organization and/or network, or not.  This
       affects a lot of constraints, because the trust model is very
       different.  For instance, as discussed later in this memo, the
       level-of-detail of maps can depend on who the involved parties
       actually are.

   2.  Size of user group: The main use case of ALTO is to provide
       guidance to any Internet application.  However, an operator of an
       ALTO server could also decide to only offer guidance to a set of
       well-known ALTO clients, e. g., after authentication and
       authorization.  In the peer-to-peer application use case, this
       could imply that only selected trackers are allowed to access the
       ALTO server.  The security implications of using ALTO in closed
       groups differ from the public Internet.

   3.  Covered destinations: In general, an ALTO server has to be able
       to provide guidance for all potential destinations.  Yet, in
       practice a given ALTO client may only be interested in a subset

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       of destinations, e.g., only in the network cost between a limited
       set of resource providers.  For instance, CDN optimization may
       not need the full ALTO cost maps, because traffic between
       individual residential users is not in scope.  This may imply
       that an ALTO server only has to provide the costs that matter for
       a given user, e. g., by customized maps.

   The following sections enumerate different classes of use cases for
   ALTO, and they discuss the deployment implications of each of them.

   However, it must be emphasized that any application using ALTO must
   also work if no ALTO servers can be found or if no responses to ALTO
   queries are received, e.g., due to connectivity problems or overload
   situations (see also [RFC6708]).

2.2.2.  Information Exposure

   An ALTO server stores information about preferences (e.g., a list of
   preferred autonomous systems, IP ranges, etc.) and ALTO clients can
   retrieve these preferences.  There are basically two different
   approaches on where the preferences are actually processed:

   1.  The ALTO server has a list of preferences and clients can
       retrieve this list via the ALTO protocol.  This preference list
       can partially be updated by the server.  The actual processing of
       the data is done on the client and thus there is no data of the
       client's operation revealed to the ALTO server .

   2.  The ALTO server has a list of preferences or preferences
       calculated during runtime and the ALTO client is sending
       information of its operation (e.g., a list of IP addresses) to
       the server.  The server is using this operational information to
       determine its preferences and returns these preferences (e.g., a
       sorted list of the IP addresses) back to the ALTO client.

   Approach 1 has the advantage (seen from the client) that all
   operational information stays within the client and is not revealed
   to the provider of the server.  On the other hand, approach 1
   requires that the provider of the ALTO server, i.e., the network
   operator, reveals information about its network structure (e.g., AS
   numbers, IP ranges, topology information in general) to the ALTO
   client.  The ALTO protocol supports this scheme by the Network and
   Cost Map Service.

   Approach 2 has the advantage (seen from the operator) that all
   operational information stays with the ALTO server and is not
   revealed to the ALTO client.  On the other hand, approach 2 requires

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   that the clients send their operational information to the server.
   This approach is realized by the ALTO Endpoint Cost Service (ECS).

   Both approaches have their pros and cons, as detailed in Section 3.3.

2.2.3.  More Advanced Deployments

   From an ALTO client's perspective, there are two fundamental ways to
   use ALTO:

   1.  Single server: An ALTO client only obtains guidance from a single
       ALTO server instance, e.g., an ALTO server that is offered by the
       network service provider of the corresponding access network.
       This ALTO server can be discovered e.g. by ALTO server discovery
       [I-D.ietf-alto-server-discovery] [I-D.kist-alto-3pdisc].

   2.  Multiple servers: An ALTO client is aware of more than one ALTO
       server.  This scenario is mostly identical to the former one if
       all those servers provide the same guidance (e.g., load
       balancing).  Yet, an ALTO client can also decide to access
       multiple servers providing different guidance, possibly from
       different operators.  In that case, it may be difficult for an
       ALTO client to compare the guidance from different servers.  How
       to discover multiple servers is an open issue.

   There are also different options regarding the guidance offered by an
   ALTO server:

   1.  Authorative servers: An ALTO server instance can provide guidance
       for all destinations for all kinds of ALTO clients.

   2.  Cascaded servers: An ALTO server may itself include an ALTO
       client and query other ALTO servers, e.g., for certain
       destinations.  This results is a cascaded deployment of ALTO
       servers, as further explained below.

   3.  Inter-server synchronization: Different ALTO servers my
       communicate by other means.  This approach is not further
       discussed in this document.

   An assumption of the ALTO solution is that ISP operate ALTO servers
   independently, irrespectively of other ISPs.  This may true for most
   envisioned deployments of ALTO but there are certain deployments that
   may have different settings.  Figure 4 shows such setting with a
   university network that is connected to two upstream providers.  ISP2
   is the national research network and ISP1 is a commercial upstream
   provider to this university network.  The university, as well as

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   ISP1, are operating their own ALTO server.  The ALTO clients, located
   on the peers will contact the ALTO server located at the university.

         +-----------+
         |   ISP1    |
         |   ALTO    |
         |  Server   |
         +----------=+
            ,-------=            ,------.
         ,-'        =`-.      ,-'         `-.
        /   Upstream=   \    /   Upstream    \
       (       ISP1 =    )  (       ISP2      )
        \           =   /    \               /
         `-.        =,-'      `-.         ,-'
            `---+---=            `+------'
                |   =             |
                |   =======================
                |,-------------.  |       =
              ,-+               `-+    +-----------+
            ,'      University     `.  |University |
           (        Network          ) |   ALTO    |
            `.  =======================|  Server   |
              `-=               +-'    +-----------+
                =`+------------'|
                = |             |
         +--------+-+         +-+--------+
         |   Peer1  |         |   PeerN  |
         +----------+         +----------+

                      Figure 4: Cascaded ALTO Server

   In this setting all "destinations" useful for the peers within ISP2
   are free-of-charge for the peers located in the university network
   (i.e., they are preferred in the rating of the ALTO server).
   However, all traffic that is not towards ISP2 will be handled by the
   ISP1 upstream provider.  Therefore, the ALTO server at the university
   has also to include the guidance given by the ISP1 ALTO server in its
   replies to the ALTO clients.  This is an example for cascaded ALTO
   servers.

3.  Deployment Considerations by ISPs

3.1.  Objectives for the Guidance to Applications

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3.1.1.  General Objectives for Traffic Optimization

   The Internet is a large network consisting of many networks
   worldwide.  These networks are built by network operators or Internet
   Service Providers (named ISP in this memo), and these networks
   provide network connectivity to access networks, such as cable
   networks, xDSL networks, 3G/4G mobile networks, etc.  Some of these
   networks are also built by universities or big organizations.  These
   network providers need to manage, to control and to audit the
   traffic.  Thus, it's important for ISPs to understand the requirement
   of optimizing traffic, and how to deploy ALTO service in these
   manageability and controllability networks.

   The objective of ALTO is to give guidance to applications on what IP
   addresses or IP prefixes are to be preferred according to the
   operator of the ALTO server.  The ALTO protocol gives means to let
   the ALTO server operator express its preference, whatever this
   preference is.

   ALTO enables ISPs to perform traffic engineering by influencing
   application resource selections.  This traffic engineering can have
   different objectives:

   1.  Inter-network traffic localization: ALTO can help to reduce
       inter-domain traffic.  The networks of ISPs are connected through
       peering points.  From a business view, the inter-network
       settlement is needed for exchanging traffic between these
       networks.  These peering agreements can be costly.  To reduce
       these costs, a simple objective is to decrease the traffic
       exchange across the peering points and thus keep the traffic in
       the own network or Autonomous System (AS) as far as possible.

   2.  Intra-network traffic localization: In case of large ISPs, the
       network may be grouped into several networks, domains, or
       Autonomous Systems (ASs).  The core network includes one or
       several backbone networks, which are connected to multiple
       aggregation, metro, and access networks.  If traffic can be
       limited to access networks, this decreases the usage of backbone
       and thus helps to save resources and costs.

   3.  Network off-loading: Compared to fixed networks, mobile networks
       have some special characteristics, including smaller link
       bandwidth, high cost, limited radio frequency resource, and
       limited terminal battery.  In mobile networks, the usage of
       wireless link should be decreased as far as possible and be used
       efficiently.  For example, in the case of a P2P service, the
       hosts in fixed networks should avoid retrieving data from hosts

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       in the mobile networks, and hosts in mobile networks should
       prefer the data retrieval from hosts in fixed networks.

   4.  Application tuning: ALTO is also a powerful tool to optimize the
       performance of applications that depend on the network and
       perform resource selection decisions.

   In the following, these objectives are explained in more detail with
   deployment examples.

3.1.2.  Inter-Network Traffic Localization

   ALTO guidance can be used to keep traffic local in a network.  An
   ALTO server can let applications prefer other hosts within the same
   network operator's network instead of randomly connecting to other
   hosts that are located in another operator's network.  Here, a
   network operator would always express its preference for hosts in its
   own network, while hosts located outside its own network are to be
   avoided (i.e., they are undesired to be considered by the
   applications).  Figure 5 shows such a scenario where hosts prefer
   hosts in the same network (e.g., Host 1 and Host 2 in ISP1 and Host 3
   and Host 4 in ISP2).

                            ,-------.         +-----------+
          ,---.          ,-'         `-.      |   Host 1  |
       ,-'     `-.      /     ISP 1   ########|ALTO Client|
      /           \    /              #  \    +-----------+
     /    ISP X    \   |              #  |    +-----------+
    /               \  \              ########|   Host 2  |
   ;             +----------------------------|ALTO Client|
   |             |   |   `-.         ,-'      +-----------+
   |             |   |      `-------'
   |             |   |      ,-------.         +-----------+
   :             |   ;   ,-'         `########|   Host 3  |
    \            |  /   /     ISP 2   # \     |ALTO Client|
     \           | /   /              #  \    +-----------+
      \          +---------+          #  |    +-----------+
       `-.     ,-'     \   |          ########|   Host 4  |
          `---'         \  +------------------|ALTO Client|
                         `-.         ,-'      +-----------+
                            `-------'

       Legend:
       ### preferred "connections"
       --- non-preferred "connections"

                Figure 5: ALTO Traffic Network Localization

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   TBD: Describes limits of this approach (e.g., traffic localization
   guidance is of less use if the peers cannot upload); describe how
   maps would look like.

3.1.3.  Intra-Network Traffic Localization

   The above sections described the results of the ALTO guidance on an
   inter-network level.  However, ALTO can also be used for intra-
   network localization.  In this case, ALTO provides guidance which
   internal hosts are to be preferred inside a single network or, e.g.,
   one AS.  Figure 6 shows such a scenario where Host 1 and Host 2 are
   located in Net 2 of ISP1 and connect via a low capacity link to the
   core (Net 1) of the same ISP1.  If Host 1 and Host 2 exchange their
   data with remote hosts, they would probably congest the bottleneck
   link.

                               ,-------.         +-----------+
          ,---.             ,-'         `-.      |   Host 1  |
       ,-'     `-.         /     ISP 1  #########|ALTO Client|
      /           \       /      Net 2  #   \    +-----------+
     /    ISP 1    \      |     #########   |    +-----------+
    /     Net 1     \     \     #           /    |   Host 2  |
   ;             ###;      \    #      ##########|ALTO Client|
   |               X~~~~~~~~~~~~X#######,-'      +-----------+
   |             ### |  ^      `-------'
   |                 |  |
   :                 ;  |
    \               /  Bottleneck
     \             /
      \           /
       `-.     ,-'
          `---'
       Legend:
       ### peer "connections"
       ~~~ bottleneck link

         Figure 6: Without Intra-Network ALTO Traffic Localization

   The operator can guide the hosts in such a situation to try first
   local hosts in the same network islands, avoiding or at least
   lowering the effect on the bottleneck link, as shown in Figure 7.

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                               ,-------.         +-----------+
          ,---.             ,-'         `-.      |   Peer 1  |
       ,-'     `-.         /     ISP 1  #########|ALTO Client|
      /           \       /      Net 2  #   \    +-----------+
     /    ISP 1    \      |             #   |    +-----------+
    /     Net 1     \     \             #########|   Peer 2  |
   ;                ;      \           ##########|ALTO Client|
   |                #~~~~~~~~~~~########,-'      +-----------+
   |             ### |  ^      `-------'
   |                 |  |
   :                 ;  |
    \               /  Bottleneck
     \             /
      \           /
       `-.     ,-'
          `---'
       Legend:
       ### peer "connections"
       ~~~ bottleneck link

          Figure 7: With Intra-Network ALTO Traffic Localization

3.1.4.  Network Off-Loading

   Another scenario is off-loading traffic from networks.  This use of
   ALTO can be beneficial in particular in mobile broadband networks.
   The network operator may have the desire to guide hosts in its own
   network to use hosts in remote networks.  One reason can be that the
   wireless network is not made for the load cause by, e.g., peer-to-
   peer applications, and the operator has the need that peers fetch
   their data from remote peers in other parts of the Internet.

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                            ,-------.         +-----------+
          ,---.          ,-'         `-.      |   Host 1  |
       ,-'     `-.      /     ISP 1   +-------|ALTO Client|
      /           \    /              |  \    +-----------+
     /    ISP X    \   |              |  |    +-----------+
    /               \  \              +-------|   Host 2  |
   ;             #-###########################|ALTO Client|
   |             #   |   `-.         ,-'      +-----------+
   |             #   |      `-------'
   |             #   |      ,-------.         +-----------+
   :             #   ;   ,-'         `+-------|   Host 3  |
    \            #  /   /     ISP 2   | \     |ALTO Client|
     \           # /   /              |  \    +-----------+
      \          ###########          |  |    +-----------+
       `-.     ,-'     \   #          +-------|   Host 4  |
          `---'         \  ###################|ALTO Client|
                         `-.         ,-'      +-----------+
                            `-------'

       Legend:
       === preferred "connections"
       --- non-preferred "connections"

              Figure 8: ALTO Traffic Network De-Localization

   Figure 8 shows the result of such a guidance process where Host 2
   prefers a connection with Host 4 instead of Host 1, as shown in
   Figure 5.

   TBD: Limits of this approach in general and with respect to p2p.
   describe how maps would look like.

3.1.5.  Application Tuning

   ALTO can also provide guidance to optimize the application-level
   topology of networked applications, e.g., by exposing network
   performance information.  Applications can often run own measurements
   to determine network performance, e.g., by active delay measurements
   or bandwidth probing, but such measurements result in overhead and
   complexity.  Accessing an ALTO server can be a simpler alternative.
   In addition, an ALTO server may also expose network information that
   applications cannot easily measure or reverse-engineer.

3.2.  Provisioning of ALTO Maps

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3.2.1.  Data Sources

   An ALTO server collects topological information from a variety of
   sources in the network and provides a cohesive, abstracted view of
   the network topology to applications using an ALTO client.  The ALTO
   server builds an ALTO-specific network topology that represents the
   network as it should be understood and utilized by the application.

   ALTO abstract network topologies can be auto-generated from the
   physical or logical topology of the underlying network.  The
   generation would typically be based on policies and rules set by the
   network operator.  The maps and the guidance can significantly differ
   depending on the use case, the network architecture, and the trust
   relationship between ALTO server and ALTO client, etc.  Besides the
   security requirements that consist of not delivering any confidential
   or critical information about the infrastructure, there are
   efficiency requirements in terms of what aspects of the network are
   visible and required by the given use case and/or application.

   The ALTO server builds topology (for either Map and ECS services)
   based on multiple sources that may include routing protocols, network
   policies, state and performance information, geo-location, etc.  The
   network topology information is controlled and managed by the ALTO
   server.  In all cases, the ALTO topology will not contain any details
   that would endanger the network integrity and security.  For
   instance, ALTO is not intended to leak raw IGP/BGP databases to ALTO
   clients.

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          +--------+     +--------+
          | Client |     | Client |
          +--------+     +--------+
                  ^       ^
                  |       | ALTO protocol
                 +---------+
                 |  ALTO   |
                 | Server  |
                 +---------+
                  ^   ^   ^    Potential
                  |   |   |  data sources
         +--------+   |   +--------+
         |            |            |
    +---------+  +---------+  +---------+
    |   BGP   |  |   I2RS  |  |   NMS   |
    | Speaker |  |  Client |  |   OSS   |
    +---------+  +---------+  +---------+
         ^            ^            ^
         |            |            |
    Link-State      I2RS      SNMP/NETCONF,
     NLRI for       data      traffic statistics,
     IGP/BGP                  IPFIX, etc.

                      Figure 9: Data sources for ALTO

   As illustrated in Figure 9, the topology data used by an ALTO server
   can originate from different data sources:

   o  The document [I-D.ietf-idr-ls-distribution] describes a mechanism
      by which links state and traffic engineering information can be
      collected from networks and shared with external components using
      the BGP routing protocol.  This is achieved using a new BGP
      Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) encoding format.
      The mechanism is applicable to physical and virtual IGP links and
      can also include Traffic Engineering (TE) data.  For instance,
      prefix data can be carried and originated in BGP, while TE data is
      originated and carried in an IGP.  The mechanism described is
      subject to policy control.  Note an ALTO Server can use other
      mechanisms to get network data, for example, peering with multiple
      IGP and BGP Speakers.

   o  The Interface to the Routing System (I2RS) is a solution for state
      transfer in and out of the Internet's routing system
      [I-D.ietf-i2rs-architecture].  An ALTO server could use an I2RS
      client to observe routing-related information.

   o  An ALTO server can also leverage Network Management Station (NMS)
      or an Operations Support System (OSS) as data sources.  A NMS or

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      OSS solutions are used to control, operate, and manage a network,
      e.g., using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or
      NETCONF.  As explained for instance in
      [I-D.farrkingel-pce-abno-architecture], the NMS and OSS can be
      consumers of network events reported and can act on these reports
      as well as displaying them to users and raising alarms.  The NMS
      and OSS can also access the Traffic Engineering Database (TED) and
      Label Switched Path Database (LSP-DB) to show the users the
      current state of the network.  In addition, NMS and OSS systems
      may have access to IGP/BGP routing information, network inventory
      data (e.g., links, nodes, or link properties not visible to
      routing protocols, such as Shared Risk Link Groups), statistics
      collection system that provides traffic information, such as
      traffic demands or link utilizations obtained from IP Flow
      Information Export (IPFIX), as well as other information (e.g.,
      syslog).  NMS or OSS systems also may have functions to correlate
      and orchestrate information originating from other data sources.
      For instance, it could be required to correlate IP prefixes with
      routers (Provider, Provider Edge, Custumer Edge, etc.), IGP areas,
      VLAN IDs, or policies.

3.2.2.  Privacy Requirements

   Providing ALTO guidance results in a win-win situation both for
   network providers and users of the ALTO information.  Applications
   possibly get a better performance, while the the network provider has
   means to optimize the traffic engineering and thus its costs.

   Still, ISPs may have other important requirements when deploying
   ALTO: In particular, an ISP may not be willing to expose sensitive
   operational details of its network.  The topology abstraction of ALTO
   enables an ISP to expose the network topology at a desired
   granularity only.

   With the ALTO Endpoint Cost Service, the ALTO client does not to have
   to implement any specific algorithm or mechanism in order to
   retrieve, maintain and process network topology information (of any
   kind).  The complexity of the network topology (computation,
   maintenance and distribution) is kept in the ALTO server and ECS is
   delivered on demand.  This allows the ALTO server to enhance and
   modify the way the topology information sources are used and
   combined.  This simplifies the enforcement of privacy policies of the
   ISP.

   The ALTO Network Map and Cost Map service expose an abstracted view
   on the ISP network topology.  Therefore, in this case care is needed
   when constructing those maps, as further discussed in Section 3.2.3.

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3.2.3.  Map Partitioning and Grouping

   Host group descriptors are used in the ALTO client protocol to
   describe the location of a host in the network topology.  These
   identifiers are called Partition ID (PID) and e.g. expand to a set of
   IP address ranges (CIDR).

   An automated ALTO implementation may use dynamic algorithms to
   aggregate network topology.  However, it is often desirable to have a
   mechanism through which the network operator can control the level
   and details of network aggregation based on a set of requirements and
   constraints.  This will typically be governed by policies that
   enforce a certain level of abstraction and prevent leakage of
   sensitive operational data.

   For instance, an ALTO server may leverage BGP information that is
   available in a networks service provider network layer and compute
   the group of prefix.  An example are BGP Communities, which are used
   in MPLS/IP networks as a common mechanism to aggregate and group
   prefixes.  A BGP Community is an attribute used to tag a prefix to
   group prefixes based on mostly any criteria (as an example, most ISP
   networks originate BGP prefixes with communities identifying the
   Point of Presence (PoP) where the prefix has been originated).  These
   BGP communities could be used to map IP address ranges to PIDs.  By
   an additional policy, the ALTO server operator may decide an
   arbitrary cost defined between groups.  Alternatively, there are
   algorithms that allows a dynamic computation of cost between groups.

3.2.4.  Rating Criteria and/or Cost Calculation

   Rating criteria are used in the ALTO client protocol to express
   topology- or connectivity-related properties, which are evaluated in
   order to generate the ALTO guidance.  The ALTO client protocol
   specification defines a basic set of rating criteria, which have to
   be supported by all implementations, and an extension procedure for
   adding new criteria.

   The following list gives an overview on further rating criteria that
   have been proposed or which are in use by ALTO-related prototype
   implementations.  This list is not intended as normative text.
   Instead, the only purpose of the following list is to document the
   rating criteria that have been proposed so far.  It can also depend
   on the use case of ALTO whether such rating criteria are useful, and
   whether the corresponding information would indeed be made available
   by ISPs.

   Distance-related rating criteria:

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   o  Relative topological distance: The term relative means that a
      larger numerical value means greater distance, but it is up to the
      ALTO service how to compute the values, and the ALTO client will
      not be informed about the nature of the information.  One way of
      generating this kind of information may be counting AS hops, but
      when querying this parameter, the ALTO client must not assume that
      the numbers actually are AS hops.

   o  Absolute topological distance, expressed in the number of
      traversed autonomous systems (AS).

   o  Absolute topological distance, expressed in the number of router
      hops (i.e., how much the TTL value of an IP packet will be
      decreased during transit).

   o  Absolute physical distance, based on knowledge of the approximate
      geolocation (e.g., continent, country) of an IP address.

   Performance-related rating criteria:

   o  The minimum achievable throughput between the resource consumer
      and the candidate resource provider, which is considered useful by
      the application (only in ALTO queries).

   o  An arbitrary upper bound for the throughput from/to the candidate
      resource provider (only in ALTO responses).  This may be, but is
      not necessarily the provisioned access bandwidth of the candidate
      resource provider.

   o  The maximum round-trip time (RTT) between resource consumer and
      the candidate resource provider, which is acceptable for the
      application for useful communication with the candidate resource
      provider (only in ALTO queries).

   o  An arbitrary lower bound for the RTT between resource consumer and
      the candidate resource provider (only in ALTO responses).  This
      may be, for example, based on measurements of the propagation
      delay in a completely unloaded network.

   Charging-related rating criteria:

   o  Traffic volume caps, in case the Internet access of the resource
      consumer is not charged by "flat rate".  For each candidate
      resource provider, the ALTO service could indicate the amount of
      data that may be transferred from/to this resource provider until
      a given point in time, and how much of this amount has already
      been consumed.  Furthermore, it would have to be indicated how
      excess traffic would be handled (e.g., blocked, throttled, or

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      charged separately at an indicated price).  The interaction of
      several applications running on a host, out of which some use this
      criterion while others don't, as well as the evaluation of this
      criterion in resource directories, which issue ALTO queries on
      behalf of other peers, are for further study.

   These rating criteria are subject to the remarks below:

   The ALTO client must be aware, that with high probability, the actual
   performance values differ significantly from these upper and lower
   bounds.  In particular, an ALTO client must not consider the "upper
   bound for throughput" parameter as a permission to send data at the
   indicated rate without using congestion control mechanisms.

   The discrepancies are due to various reasons, including, but not
   limited to the facts that

   o  the ALTO service is not an admission control system

   o  the ALTO service may not know the instantaneous congestion status
      of the network

   o  the ALTO service may not know all link bandwidths, i.e., where the
      bottleneck really is, and there may be shared bottlenecks

   o  the ALTO service may not have all information about the actual
      routing

   o  the ALTO service may not know whether the candidate peer itself is
      overloaded

   o  the ALTO service may not know whether the candidate peer throttles
      the bandwidth it devotes for the considered application

   o  the ALTO service may not know whether the candidate peer will
      throttle the data it sends to us (e.g., because of some fairness
      algorithm, such as tit-for-tat).

   Because of these inaccuracies and the lack of complete, instantaneous
   state information, which are inherent to the ALTO service, the
   application must use other mechanisms (such as passive measurements
   on actual data transmissions) to assess the currently achievable
   throughput, and it must use appropriate congestion control mechanisms
   in order to avoid a congestion collapse.  Nevertheless, these rating
   criteria may provide a useful shortcut for quickly excluding
   candidate resource providers from such probing, if it is known in
   advance that connectivity is in any case worse than what is
   considered the minimum useful value by the respective application.

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   Rating criteria that should not be defined for and used by the ALTO
   service include:

   o  Performance metrics that are closely related to the instantaneous
      congestion status.  The definition of alternate approaches for
      congestion control is explicitly out of the scope of ALTO.
      Instead, other appropriate means, such as using TCP based
      transport, have to be used to avoid congestion.

   o  Performance metrics that raise privacy concerns.  For instance, it
      has been questioned whether an ALTO service could publicly expose
      the provisioned access bandwidth, e.g. of cable / DSL customers,
      because this could enables identification of "premium" customers.

3.3.  Known Limitations of ALTO

   This section describes some known limitations of ALTO in general or
   specific mechanisms in ALTO.

3.3.1.  Limitations of Map-based Approaches

   The specification of the ALTO protocol [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol] uses
   so-called network maps.  The network map approach uses host group
   descriptors that group one or multiple subnetworks (i.e., IP
   prefixes) to a single aggregate.  A set of IP prefixes is called
   partition and the associated Host Group Descriptor is called
   Partition ID (PID).  The "costs" between the various partition IDs is
   stored in a second map, the cost map.  Map-based approaches lower the
   signaling load on the server as maps have to be retrieved only if
   they change.

   One main assumption for map-based approaches is that the information
   provided in these maps is static for a longer period of time.  This
   assumption is fine as long as the network operator does not change
   any parameter, e.g., routing within the network and to the upstream
   peers, IP address assignment stays stable (and thus the mapping to
   the partitions).  However, there are several cases where this
   assumption is not valid:

   1.  ISPs reallocate IP subnets from time to time;

   2.  ISPs reallocate IP subnets on short notice;

   3.  IP prefix blocks may be assigned to a router that serves a
       variety of access networks;

   4.  Network costs between IP prefixes may change depending on the
       ISP's routing and traffic engineering.

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   Explanation:

   For 1): ISPs reallocate IPv4 subnets within their infrastructure from
   time to time, partly to ensure the efficient usage of IPv4 addresses
   (a scarce resource), and partly to enable efficient route tables
   within their network routers.  The frequency of these "renumbering
   events" depend on the growth in number of subscribers and the
   availability of address space within the ISP.  As a result, a
   subscriber's household device could retain an IPv4 address for as
   short as a few minutes, or for months at a time or even longer.

   It has been suggested that ISPs providing ALTO services could sub-
   divide their subscribers' devices into different IPv4 subnets (or
   certain IPv4 address ranges) based on the purchased service tier, as
   well as based on the location in the network topology.  The problem
   is that this sub-allocation of IPv4 subnets tends to decrease the
   efficiency of IPv4 address allocation.  A growing ISP that needs to
   maintain high efficiency of IPv4 address utilization may be reluctant
   to jeopardize their future acquisition of IPv4 address space.

   However, this is not an issue for map-based approaches if changes are
   applied in the order of days.

   For 2): ISPs can use techniques that allow the reallocation of IP
   prefixes on very short notice, i.e., within minutes.  An IP prefix
   that has no IP address assignment to a host anymore can be
   reallocated to areas where there is currently a high demand for IP
   addresses.

   For 3): In residential access networks (e.g., DSL, cable), IP
   prefixes are assigned to broadband gateways, which are the first IP-
   hop in the access-network between the Customer Premises Equipment
   (CPE) and the Internet.  The access-network between CPE and broadband
   gateway (called aggregation network) can have varying characteristics
   (and thus associated costs), but still using the same IP prefix.  For
   instance one IP addresses IP11 out of a IP prefix IP1 can be assigned
   to a VDSL (e.g., 2 MBit/s uplink) access line while the subsequent IP
   address IP12 is assigned to a slow ADSL line (e.g., 128 kbit/s
   uplink).  These IP addresses are assigned on a first come first
   served basis, i.e., the a single IP address out of the same IP prefix
   can change its associated costs quite fast.  This may not be an issue
   with respect to the used upstream provider (thus the cross ISP
   traffic) but depending on the capacity of the aggregation-network
   this may raise to an issue.

   For 4): The routing and traffic engineering inside an ISP network, as
   well as the peering with other autonomous systems, can change

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   dynamically and affect the information exposed by an ALTO server.  As
   a result, cost map and possibly also network maps can change.

3.3.2.  Limitiations of Non-Map-based Approaches

   The specification of the ALTO protocol [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol] uses,
   amongst others mechanism, a mechanism called Endpoint Cost Service
   (ECS).  ALTO clients can ask guidance for specific IP addresses to
   the ALTO server.  However, asking for IP addresses, asking with long
   lists of IP addresses, and asking quite frequently may overload the
   ALTO server.  The server has to rank each received IP address, which
   causes load at the server.  This may be amplified by the fact that
   not only a single ALTO client is asking for guidance, but a larger
   number of them.  The results of the ECS are also more difficult to
   cache than ALTO maps.

   Caching of IP addresses at the ALTO client or the usage of the H12
   approach [I-D.kiesel-alto-h12] in conjunction with caching may lower
   the query load on the ALTO server.

3.4.  Monitoring the Performance of ALTO

3.4.1.  Supervising the Benefits of ALTO

   An ISP providing ALTO may want to assess the benefits of ALTO as part
   of the management and operations (cf. [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol]).  For
   instance, the ISP might be interested in understanding whether the
   provided ALTO maps are effective, and in order to decide whether an
   adjustment of the ALTO configuration would be useful.  Such insight
   can be obtained from a monitoring infrastructure.  An NSP offering
   ALTO could consider the impact on (or integration with) traffic
   engineering and the deployment of a monitoring service to observe the
   effects of ALTO operations.  To construct an effective monitoring
   infrastructure, the ISP should decise how to monitor the performance
   of ALTO and identify and deploy data sources to collect data to
   compute the performance metrics.  The required monitoring depends on
   the network infrastructure and the use of ALTO, and an exhaustive
   description is outside the scope of this document.

3.4.2.  How to Monitor ALTO Performance

   ALTO realizes an interface between the network and applications.
   This implies that an effective monitoring infrastructure may have to
   deal with both network and application performance metrics.  This
   document does not comprehensively list all performance metrics that
   could be relevant, nor does it formally specify metrics.

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   The performance impact of ALTO can be classified in a number of
   different categories:

   o  Total amount and distribution of traffic: ALTO enables ISPs to
      influence and localize traffic of applications that use the ALTO
      service.  An ISP may therefore be interested in analyzing the
      impact on the traffic, i.e., whether network traffic patterns are
      shifted.  For instance, if ALTO shall be used to reduce the inter-
      domain P2P traffic, it makes sense to evaluate the total amount of
      inter-domain traffic of an ISP.  Then, one possibility is to study
      how the introduction of ALTO reduces the total interdomain traffic
      (inbound and/our outbound).  If the ISPs intention is to localize
      the traffic inside his network, the network-internal traffic
      distribution will be of interest.  Effectiveness of localization
      can be quantified in different ways, e.g., by the load on core
      routers and backbone links, or by considering more advanced
      effects, such as the average number of hops that traffic traverses
      inside a domain.

   o  Application performance: The objective of ALTO is improve
      application performance.  ALTO can be used by very different types
      applications, with different communication characteristics and
      requirements.  For instance, if ALTO guidance achieves traffic
      localization, one would expect that applications achieve a higher
      throughput and/or smaller delays to retrieve data.  Application-
      specific performance characteristics (e.g., video or audio
      quality) can be useful as well.  In addition, selected statistics
      from the TCP/IP stack in hosts can be useful, e.g., the number of
      retransmitted TCP segments.

   o  ALTO system performance: As mentioned in [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol],
      there are a number of interesting parameters that can be measured
      at an ALTO server, including the Requests and responses for each
      service listed in a Information Directory (total counts and size
      in bytes) or the CPU and memory utilization.  Also, the
      characteristics of the ALTO maps can be monitored as well, e.g.,
      regarding the frequency of ALTO map updates, the number of PIDs,
      or the ALTO map sizes (in-memory size, encoded size, number of
      entries).

   o  ALTO service utilization: Of potential interet can be the share of
      applications or customers that actually use an offered ALTO
      service, i.e., the degree of adoption.

   Monitoring statistics can be aggregated, averaged, and normalized in
   different ways.  This document does not mandate specific ways how to
   calculate metrics.

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   One way to quantify the benefit of deploying ALTO is to measure
   before and after enabling the ALTO service.  In addition to passive
   monitoring, some data could also be obtained by active measurements,
   but due to the resulting overhead, the latter should be used with
   care.  Yet, in all monitoring activities an ALTO service provider has
   to take into account that ALTO Clients are not bound to ALTO Server
   guidance as ALTO is only one source of information, and any
   measurement result may thus be biased.

3.4.3.  Monitoring Infrastructure

   Understanding the impact of ALTO may require interaction between
   different systems, operating at different layers.  Some information
   discussed in the preceding section is only visible to an ISP, while
   application-level performance can hardly be measured inside the
   network.  It is possible that not all information of potential
   interest can directly be measured, either because no corresponding
   monitoring infrastructure or measurement method exists, or because it
   is not easily accessible.

   Potential sources for monitoring the use of ALTO include:

   o  Network Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) systems:
      Many ISPs deploy OAM systems to monitor the network traffic, which
      may have insight into traffic volumes, network topology, and
      bandwidth information inside the management area.  Data can be
      obtained by SNMP, Netflow, IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX),
      syslog, etc.

   o  Applications/clients: Relevant data could be obtained by
      instrumentation of applications.

   o  ALTO server: If available, log files or other statistics data
      could be analyzed.

   o  Other application entities: In several use cases, there are other
      application entities that could provide data as well.  For
      instance, there may be centralized log servers that collect data.

   In many ALTO use cases some data sources are located within an ISP
   while some other data is gathered at application level.  Correlation
   of data would require a collaboration agreement between the ISP and
   an application owner, including aggrements of data interchange
   formats, methods of delivery, etc.  In practice, such a collaboration
   may not be possible in all use cases of ALTO, because the monitoring
   data can be sensitive, and because the interacting entities may have
   different priorities.  Details of how to build an over-arching

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   monitoring system for evaluating the benefits of ALTO are outside the
   scope of this memo.

3.5.  Map Examples for Different Types of ISPs

3.5.1.  Small ISP with Single Internet Uplink

   For a small ISP, the inter-domain traffic optimizing problem is how
   to decrease the traffic exchanged with other ISPs, because of high
   settlement costs.  By using the ALTO service to optimize traffic, a
   small ISP can define two "optimization areas": one is its own
   network; the other one consists of all other network destinations.
   The cost map can be defined as follows: the cost of link between
   clients of inner ISP's networks is lower than between clients of
   outer ISP's networks and clients of inner ISP's network.  As a
   result, a host with ALTO client inside the network of this ISP will
   prefer retrieving data from hosts connected to the same ISP.

   An example is given in Figure 10.  It is assumed that ISP A is a
   small ISP only having one access network.  As operator of the ALTO
   service, ISP A can define its network to be one optimization area,
   named as PID1, and define other networks to be the other optimization
   area, named as PID2.  C1 is denoted as the cost inside the network of
   ISP A. C2 is denoted as the cost from PID2 to PID1, and C3 from PID1
   to PID2.  For the sake of simplifity, in the following C2=C3 is
   assumed.  In order to keep traffic local inside ISP A, it makes sense
   to define: C1<C2

              -----------
          ////           \\\\
        //                   \\
      //                       \\                  /-----------\
     | +---------+               |             ////             \\\\
     | | ALTO    |  ISP A        |    C2      |    Other Networks   |
    |  | Service |  PID 1         <-----------     PID 2
     | +---------+  C1           |            |                     |
     |                           |             \\\\             ////
      \\                       //                  \-----------/
        \\                   //
          \\\\           ////
              -----------

             Figure 10: Example ALTO deployment in small ISPs

   A simplified extract of the corresponding ALTO network and cost maps
   is listed in Figure 11 and Figure 12, assuming that the network of
   ISP A has the IPv4 address ranges 192.0.2.0/24 and 198.51.100.0/25.

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   In this example, the cost values C1 and C2 can be set to any number
   C1<C2.

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      ...
      Content-Type: application/alto-networkmap+json

      {
       ...
        "network-map" : {
          "PID1" : {
            "ipv4" : [
              "192.0.2.0/24",
              "198.51.100.0/25"
            ]
          },
          "PID2" : {
            "ipv4" : [
              "0.0.0.0/0"
            ],
            "ipv6" : [
              "::/0"
            ]
          }
        }
      }

                    Figure 11: Example ALTO network map

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      ...
      Content-Type: application/alto-costmap+json

      {
          ...
          "cost-type" : {"cost-mode"  : "numerical",
                         "cost-metric": "routingcost"
          }
        },
        "cost-map" : {
          "PID1": { "PID1": C1,  "PID2": C2 },
          "PID2": { "PID1": C2,  "PID2": 0 },
        }
      }

                     Figure 12: Example ALTO cost map

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3.5.2.  ISP with Several Fixed Access Networks

   For a large ISP with a fixed network comprising several access
   networks and a core network, the traffic optimizing problems will
   include (1) using the backbone network efficiently, (2) adjusting the
   traffic balance in different access networks according to traffic
   conditions and management policies, and (3) achieving a reduction of
   settlement costs with other ISPs.

   Such a large ISP deploying an ALTO service may want to optimize its
   traffic according to the network topology of its access networks.
   For example, each access network could be defined to be one
   optimization area, i.e., traffic should be kept locally withing that
   area if possible.  Then the costs between those access networks can
   be defined according to a corresponding traffic optimizing
   requirement by this ISP.  One example setup is further described
   below and also shown in Figure 13.

   In this example, ISP A has one backbone network and three access
   networks, named as AN A, AN B, and AN C. A P2P application is used in
   this example.  For the traffic optimization, the first requirement is
   to decrease the P2P traffic on the backbone network inside the
   Autonomous System of ISP A; and the second requirement is to decrease
   the P2P traffic to other ISPs, i.e., other Autonomous Systems.  The
   second requirement can be assumed to have priority over the first
   one.  Also, we assume that the settlement rate with ISP B is lower
   than with other ISPs.  Then ISP A can deploy an ALTO service to meet
   these traffic optimization requirements.  In the following, we will
   give an example of an ALTO setting and configuration according to
   these requirements.

   In inner network of ISP A, we can define each access network to be
   one optimization area, and assign one PID to each access network,
   such as PID 1, PID 2, and PID 3.  Because of different peerings with
   different outer ISPs, we define ISP B to be one optimization area,
   and we assign PID 4 to it.  We define all other networks to be one
   optimization area and assign PID 5 to it.

   We assign costs (C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7, C8) as shown in
   Figure 13.  Cost C1 is denoted as the link cost in inner AN A (PID
   1), and C2 and C3 are defined accordingly.  C4 is denoted as the link
   cost from PID 1 to PID 2, and C5 is the correspinding cost from PID
   3, which is assumed to have a similar value.  C6 is the cost between
   PID 1 and PID 3.  For simplicity, we assume symmetrical costs between
   the AN this example.  C7 is denoted as the link cost from the ISP B
   to ISP A. C8 is the link cost from other networks to ISP A.

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   According to previous discussion of the first requirement and the
   second requirement, the relationship of these costs will be defined
   as: (C1, C2, C3) < (C4, C5, C6) < (C7) < (C8)

    +------------------------------------+         +----------------+
    | ISP A  +---------------+           |         |                |
    |        |    Backbone   |           |   C7    |      ISP B     |
    |     +--+    Network    +---+       |<--------+      PID 4     |
    |     |  +-------+-------+   |       |         |                |
    |     |          |           |       |         |                |
    |     |          |           |       |         +----------------+
    | +---+--+    +--+---+     +-+----+  |
    | |AN A  | C4 |AN B  |  C5 |AN C  |  |
    | |PID 1 +<-->|PID 2 |<--->+PID 3 |  |
    | |C1    |    |C2    |     |C3    |  |         +----------------+
    | +---+--+    +------+     +-+----+  |         |                |
    |     |                      |       |   C8    | Other Networks |
    |     +----------------------+       |<--------+ PID 5          |
    |                 C6                 |         |                |
    |                                    |         |                |
    +------------------------------------+         +----------------+

    Figure 13: ALTO deployment in large ISPs with layered fixed network
                                structures

3.5.3.  ISP with Fixed and Mobile Network

   An ISP with both mobile network and fixed network my focus on
   optimizing the mobile traffic by keeping traffic in the fixed network
   as far as possible, because wireless bandwidth is a scarce resource
   and traffic is costly in mobile network.  In such a case, the main
   requirement of traffic optimization could be decreasing the usage of
   radio resources in the mobile network.  An ALTO service can be
   deployed to meet these needs.

   Figure 14 shows an example: ISP A operates one mobile network, which
   is connected to a backbone network.  The ISP also runs two fixed
   access networks AN A and AN B, which are also connected to the
   backbone network.  In this network structure, the mobile network can
   be defined as one optimization area, and PID 1 can be assigned to it.
   Access networks AN A and B can also be defined as optimization areas,
   and PID 2 and PID 3 can be assigned, respectively.  The cost values
   are then defined as shown in Figure 14.

   To decrease the usage of wireless link, the relationship of these
   costs can be defined as follows:

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   From view of mobile network: C4 < C1.  This means that clients in
   mobile network requiring data resource from other clients will prefer
   clients in AN A to clients in the mobile network.  This policy can
   decrease the usage of wireless link and power consumption in
   terminals.

   From view of AN A: C2 < C6, C5 = maximum cost.  This means that
   clients in other optimization area will avoid retrieving data from
   the mobile network.

    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
    |                                                                 |
    |  ISP A                 +-------------+                          |
    |               +--------+   ALTO      +---------+                |
    |               |        |   Service   |         |                |
    |               |        +------+------+         |                |
    |               |               |                |                |
    |               |               |                |                |
    |               |               |                |                |
    |       +-------+-------+       | C6    +--------+------+         |
    |       |     AN A      |<--------------|      AN B     |         |
    |       |     PID 2     |   C7  |       |      PID 3    |         |
    |       |     C2        |-------------->|      C3       |         |
    |       +---------------+       |       +---------------+         |
    |             ^    |            |              |     ^            |
    |             |    |            |              |     |            |
    |             |    |C4          |              |     |            |
    |          C5 |    |            |              |     |            |
    |             |    |   +--------+---------+    |     |            |
    |             |    +-->|  Mobile Network  |<---+     |            |
    |             |        |  PID 1           |          |            |
    |             +------- |  C1              |----------+            |
    |                      +------------------+                       |
    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+

          Figure 14: ALTO deployment in ISPs with mobile network

3.6.  Deployment Experiences

   The examples in the previous section are simple and do not consider
   specific requirements inside access networks, such as different link
   types.  Deploying an ALTO service in real network will have to
   require further network conditions and requirements.  One real
   example is described in greater detail in reference
   [I-D.lee-alto-chinatelecom-trial].

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   Also, experiments have been conducted with ALTO-like deployments in
   Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks.  For instance, NTT
   performed tests with their HINT server implementation and dummy nodes
   to gain insight on how an ALTO-like service influence peer-to-peer
   systems [I-D.kamei-p2p-experiments-japan].  The results of an early
   experiment conducted in the Comcast network are documented in
   [RFC5632].

4.  Using ALTO for P2P Traffic Optimization

4.1.  Overview

4.1.1.  Usage Scenario

   Peer-to-peer applications can be build without and with use of a
   centralized resource directory ("tracker").  The scope of this
   section is the interaction of P2P applications with the ALTO service,
   focusing on the use case with a centralized resource directory.  In
   this scenario, the resource consumer ("peer") asks the resource
   directory for a list of candidate resource providers, which can
   provide the desired resource.

   For efficiency reasons (i.e., message size), usually only a subset of
   all resource providers known to the resource directory will be
   returned to the resource consumer.  Some or all of these resource
   providers, plus further resource providers learned by other means
   such as direct communication between peers, will be contacted by the
   resource consumer for accessing the resource.  The purpose of ALTO is
   giving guidance on this peer selection, which is supposed to yield
   better-than-random results.  The tracker response as well as the ALTO
   guidance are most beneficial in the initial phase after the resource
   consumer has decided to access a resource, as long as only few
   resource providers are known.  Later, when the resource consumer has
   already exchanged some data with other peers and measured the
   transmission speed, the relative importance of ALTO may dwindle.

4.1.2.  Applicability of ALTO

   A tracker-based P2P application can leverage ALTO in different ways.
   In the following, the different alternatives and their pros and cons
   are discussed.

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                                 ,-------.
          ,---.               ,-'         `-.   +-----------+
       ,-'     `-.           /     ISP 1     \  |   Peer 1  |*****
      /           \         / +-------------+ \ |           |    *
     /    ISP X    \   +=====>| ALTO Server |  )+-----------+    *
    /               \  =    \ +-------------+ / +-----------+    *
   ; +-----------+   : =     \               /  |   Peer 2  |    *
   | |  Tracker  |<====+      `-.         ,-'   |           |*****
   | |ALTO Client|<====+         `-------'      +-----------+   **
   | +-----------+   | =         ,-------.                      **
   :        *        ; =      ,-'         `-.   +-----------+   **
    \       *       /  =     /     ISP 2     \  |   Peer 3  |   **
     \      *      /   =    / +-------------+ \ |           |*****
      \     *     /    +=====>| ALTO Server |  )+-----------+  ***
       `-.  *  ,-'          \ +-------------+ / +-----------+  ***
          `-*-'              \               /  |   Peer 4  |*****
            *                 `-.         ,-'   |           | ****
            *                    `-------'      +-----------+ ****
            *                                                 ****
            *                                                 ****
            ***********************************************<******
       Legend:
       === ALTO client protocol
       *** Application protocol

      Figure 15: Global tracker accessing ALTO server at various ISPs

   Figure 15 depicts a tracker-based system in which the tracker embeds
   the ALTO client.  The tracker itself is hosted and operated by an
   entity different than the ISP hosting and operating the ALTO server.
   A tracker outside the network of the ISP is the typical use case.
   For instance, a tracker like Pirate Bay can serve Bittorrent peers
   world-wide.  Initially, the tracker has to look-up the ALTO server in
   charge for each peer where it receives a ALTO query for.  Therefore,
   the ALTO server has to discover the handling ALTO server, as
   described in [I-D.ietf-alto-server-discovery].  However, the peers do
   not have any way to query the server themselves.  This setting allows
   giving the peers a better selection of candidate peers for their
   operation at an initial time, but does not consider peers learned
   through direct peer-to-peer knowledge exchange.  This is called peer
   exchange (PEX) in bittorent, for instance.

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                            ,-------.         +-----------+
          ,---.          ,-'         `-.  +==>|   Peer 1  |*****
       ,-'     `-.      /     ISP 1     \ =   |ALTO Client|    *
      /           \    / +-------------+<=+   +-----------+    *
     /    ISP X    \   | + ALTO Server |<=+   +-----------+    *
    /               \  \ +-------------+ /=   |   Peer 2  |    *
   ;   +---------+   :  \               / +==>|ALTO Client|*****
   |   | Global  |   |   `-.         ,-'      +-----------+   **
   |   | Tracker |   |      `-------'                         **
   |   +---------+   |      ,-------.         +-----------+   **
   :        *        ;   ,-'         `-.  +==>|   Peer 3  |   **
    \       *       /   /     ISP 2     \ =   |ALTO Client|*****
     \      *      /   / +-------------+<=+   +-----------+  ***
      \     *     /    | | ALTO Server |<=+   +-----------+  ***
       `-.  *  ,-'     \ +-------------+ /=   |   Peer 4  |*****
          `-*-'         \               / +==>|ALTO Client| ****
            *            `-.         ,-'      +-----------+ ****
            *               `-------'                       ****
            *                                               ****
            ***********************************************<****
       Legend:
       === ALTO client protocol
       *** Application protocol

              Figure 16: Global Tracker - Local ALTO Servers

   The scenario in Figure 16 lets the peers directly communicate with
   their ISP's ALTO server (i.e., ALTO client embedded in the peers),
   giving thus the peers the most control on which information they
   query for, as they can integrate information received from trackers
   and through direct peer-to-peer knowledge exchange.

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                             ,-------.         +-----------+
           ,---.          ,-'  ISP 1  `-.  ***>|   Peer 1  |
        ,-'     `-.      /+-------------+\ *   |           |
       /           \    / +   Tracker   |<**   +-----------+
      /    ISP X    \   | +-----===-----+<**   +-----------+
     /               \  \ +-----===-----+ /*   |   Peer 2  |
    ;   +---------+   :  \+ ALTO Server |/ ***>|           |
    |   | Global  |   |   +-------------+      +-----------+
    |   | Tracker |   |      `-------'
    |   +---------+   |                        +-----------+
    :          ^      ;      ,-------.         |   Peer 3  |
     \         *     /    ,-'  ISP 2  `-.  ***>|           |
      \        *    /    /+-------------+\ *   +-----------+
       \       *   /    / +   Tracker   |<**   +-----------+
        `-.    *,-'     | +-----===-----+ |    |   Peer 4  |<*
           `---*        \ +-----===-----+ /    |           | *
               *         \+ ALTO Server |/     +-----------+ *
               *          +-------------+                    *
               *             `-------'                       *
               ***********************************************
        Legend:
        === ALTO client protocol
        *** Application protocol

     Figure 17: P4P approach with local tracker and local ALTO server

   There are some attempts to let ISP's to deploy their own trackers, as
   shown in Figure 17.  In this case, the client has no chance to get
   guidance from the ALTO server, other than talking to the ISP's
   tracker.  However, the peers would have still chance the contact
   other trackers, deployed by entities other than the peer's ISP.

   Figure 17 and Figure 15 ostensibly take peers the possibility to
   directly query the ALTO server, if the communication with the ALTO
   server is not permitted for any reason.  However, considering the
   plethora of different applications of ALTO, e.g., multiple tracker
   and non-tracker based P2P systems and or applications searching for
   relays, it seems to be beneficial for all participants to let the
   peers directly query the ALTO server.  The peers are also the single
   point having all operational knowledge to decide whether to use the
   ALTO guidance and how to use the ALTO guidance.  This is a preference
   for the scenario depicted in Figure Figure 16.

4.2.  Deployment Recommendations

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4.2.1.  ALTO Services

   In case of peer-to-peer networks, two different ALTO services can be
   used: The Cost Map Service is often prefered as solution by peer-to-
   peer software implementors and users, since it avoids disclosuring
   peer IP addresses to a centralized entity.  Different to that,
   network operators may have a preference for the Endpoint Cost
   Service, since it does not require exposure of the network topology.

   For actual use of ALTO in P2P applications, both software vendors and
   network operators have to agree which ALTO services to use.  The ALTO
   protocol is flexible and supports both services.  Note that for other
   use cases of ALTO, in particular in more controlled environments,
   both the Cost Map Service as well as ECS might be feasible and it is
   more an engineering tradeoff whether to use a map-based or query-
   based ALTO service.

4.2.2.  Guidance Considerations

   The ALTO protocol specification [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol] details how
   an ALTO client can query an ALTO server for guiding information and
   receive the corresponding replies.  However, in the considered
   scenario of a tracker-based P2P application, there are two
   fundamentally different possibilities where to place the ALTO client:

   1.  ALTO client in the resource consumer ("peer")

   2.  ALTO client in the resource directory ("tracker")

   In the following, both scenarios are compared in order to explain the
   need for third-party ALTO queries.

   In the first scenario (see Figure 18), the resource consumer queries
   the resource directory for the desired resource (F1).  The resource
   directory returns a list of potential resource providers without
   considering ALTO (F2).  It is then the duty of the resource consumer
   to invoke ALTO (F3/F4), in order to solicit guidance regarding this
   list.

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   Peer w. ALTO cli.            Tracker               ALTO Server
   --------+--------       --------+--------       --------+--------
           | F1 Tracker query      |                       |
           |======================>|                       |
           | F2 Tracker reply      |                       |
           |<======================|                       |
           | F3 ALTO client protocol query                 |
           |---------------------------------------------->|
           | F4 ALTO client protocol reply                 |
           |<----------------------------------------------|
           |                       |                       |

   ====  Application protocol (i.e., tracker-based P2P app protocol)
   ----  ALTO client protocol

      Figure 18: Basic message sequence chart for resource consumer-
                           initiated ALTO query

   In the second scenario (see Figure 19), the resource directory has an
   embedded ALTO client, which we will refer to as RDAC in this
   document.  After receiving a query for a given resource (F1) the
   resource directory invokes the RDAC to evaluate all resource
   providers it knows (F2/F3).  Then it returns a, possibly shortened,
   list containing the "best" resource providers to the resource
   consumer (F4).

         Peer               Tracker w. RDAC           ALTO Server
   --------+--------       --------+--------       --------+--------
           | F1 Tracker query      |                       |
           |======================>|                       |
           |                       | F2 ALTO cli. p. query |
           |                       |---------------------->|
           |                       | F3 ALTO cli. p. reply |
           |                       |<----------------------|
           | F4 Tracker reply      |                       |
           |<======================|                       |
           |                       |                       |

   ====  Application protocol (i.e., tracker-based P2P app protocol)
   ----  ALTO client protocol

    Figure 19: Basic message sequence chart for third-party ALTO query

   Note: the message sequences depicted in Figure 18 and Figure 19 may
   occur both in the target-aware and the target-independent query mode
   (c.f. [RFC6708]).  In the target-independent query mode no message
   exchange with the ALTO server might be needed after the tracker
   query, because the candidate resource providers could be evaluated

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   using a locally cached "map", which has been retrieved from the ALTO
   server some time ago.

   The first approach has the following problem: While the resource
   directory might know thousands of peers taking part in a swarm, the
   list returned to the resource consumer is usually shortened for
   efficiency reasons.  Therefore, the "best" (in the sense of ALTO)
   potential resource providers might not be contained in that list
   anymore, even before ALTO can consider them.

   Much better traffic optimization could be achieved if the tracker
   would evaluate all known peers using ALTO.  This list would then
   include a significantly higher fraction of "good" peers.  (Note, that
   if the tracker returned "good" peers only, there might be a risk that
   the swarm might disconnect and split into several disjunct
   partitions.  However, finding the right mix of ALTO-biased and random
   peer selection is out of the scope of this document.)

   Therefore, from an overall optimization perspective, the second
   scenario with the ALTO client embedded in the resource directory is
   advantageous, because it is ensured that the addresses of the "best"
   resource providers are actually delivered to the resource consumer.
   An architectural implication of this insight is that the ALTO server
   discovery procedures must support third-party discovery.  That is, as
   the tracker issues ALTO queries on behalf of the peer which contacted
   the tracker, the tracker must be able to discover an ALTO server that
   can give guidance suitable for that respective peer (see
   [I-D.kist-alto-3pdisc]).

5.  Using ALTO for CDNs

5.1.  Overview

5.1.1.  Usage Scenario

   This section discuss the usage of ALTO for Content Delivery Networks
   (CDNs) [I-D.jenkins-alto-cdn-use-cases].  CDNs are used in the
   delivery of some Internet services (e.g. delivery of websites,
   software updates and video delivery) from a location closer to the
   location of the user.  A CDN typically consists of a network of
   servers often attached to Network Service Provider (NSP) networks.
   The point of attachment is often as close to content consumers and
   peering points as economically or operationally feasible in order to
   decrease traffic load on the NSP backbone and to provide better user
   experience measured by reduced latency and higher throughput.

   CDNs use several techniques to redirect a client to a server
   (surrogate).  A request routing function within a CDN is responsible

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   for receiving content requests from user agents, obtaining and
   maintaining necessary information about a set of candidate
   surrogates, and for selecting and redirecting the user agent to the
   appropriate surrogate.  One common way is relying on the DNS system,
   but there are many other ways, see [RFC3568].

   In order to derive the optimal benefit from a CDN it is preferable to
   deliver content from the servers (caches) that are "closest" to the
   end user requesting the content. "closest" may be as simple as
   geographical or IP topology distance, but it may also consider other
   combinations of metrics and CDN or Network Service Provider (NSP)
   policies.

   User Agent                  Request Router                 Surrogate
        |                             |                           |
        |     F1 Initial Request      |                           |
        +---------------------------->|                           |
        |                             +--+                        |
        |                             |  | F2 Surrogate Selection |
        |                             |<-+       (using ALTO)     |
        |   F3 Redirection Response   |                           |
        |<----------------------------+                           |
        |                             |                           |
        |     F4 Content Request      |                           |
        +-------------------------------------------------------->|
        |                             |                           |
        |                             |          F5 Content       |
        |<--------------------------------------------------------+
        |                             |                           |

               Figure 20: Example of CDN surrogate selection

   Figure 20 illustrates the interaction between a user agent, a request
   router, and a surrogate for the delivery of content in a single CDN.
   As also explained in [I-D.jenkins-alto-cdn-use-cases], the user agent
   makes an initial request to the CDN (F1).  This may be an
   application-level request (e.g.  HTTP, RTMP, etc.) or a DNS request.
   In the second step (F2), the request router selects an appropriate
   surrogate (or set of Surrogates) based on the user agent's (or its
   proxy's) IP address, the request router's knowledge of the network
   topology (which can be obtained by ALTO) and reachability cost
   between CDN caches and end users, and any additional CDN policies.
   Then, the request router responds to the initial request with an
   appropriate response containing a redirection to the selected cache,
   for example by returning an appropriate DNS A/AAAA record, a HTTP 302
   redirect, etc.  (F3).  The user agent uses this information to
   connect directly to the surrogate and request the desired content
   (F4), which is then delivered (F5).

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   In addition to use by a single CDN, ALTO can also be used in
   scenarios that interconnect several CDNs.  This use case is detailed
   in [I-D.seedorf-cdni-request-routing-alto].

5.1.2.  Applicability of ALTO

   The most simple use case for ALTO in a CDN context is to improve the
   selection of a CDN surrogate or origin.  In this case, the CDN makes
   use of an ALTO server to choose a better CDN surrogate or origin than
   would otherwise be the case.  Although it is possible to obtain raw
   network map and cost information in other ways, for example passively
   listening to the NSP's routing protocols or use of active probing,
   the use of an ALTO service to expose that information may provide
   additional control to the NSP over how their network map/cost is
   exposed.  Additionally it may enable the NSP to maintain a functional
   separation between their routing plane and network map computation
   functions.  This may be attractive for a number of reasons, for
   example:

   o  The ALTO service could provide a filtered view of the network and/
      or cost map that relates to CDN locations and their proximity to
      end users, for example to allow the NSP to control the level of
      topology detail they are willing to share with the CDN.

   o  The ALTO service could apply additional policies to the network
      map and cost information to provide a CDN-specific view of the
      network map/cost, for example to allow the NSP to encourage the
      CDN to use network links that would not ordinarily be preferred by
      a Shortest Path First routing calculation.

   o  The routing plane may be operated and controlled by a different
      operational entity (even within a single NSP) to the CDN.
      Therefore, the CDN may not be able to passively listen to routing
      protocols, nor may it have access to other network topology data
      (e.g., inventory databases).

   When CDN servers are deployed outside of an NSP's network or in a
   small number of central locations within an NSP's network a
   simplified view of the NSP's topology or an approximation of
   proximity is typically sufficient to enable the CDN to serve end
   users from the optimal server/location.  As CDN servers are deployed
   deeper within NSP networks it becomes necessary for the CDN to have
   more detailed knowledge of the underlying network topology and costs
   between network locations in order to enable the CDN to serve end
   users from the most optimal servers for the NSP.

   The request router in a CDN will typicallly also take into account
   criteria and constraints that are not related to network topology,

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   such as the current load of CDN surrogates, content owner policies,
   end user subscriptions, etc.  This document only discusses use of
   ALTO for network information.

   A general issue for CDNs is that the CDN logic has to match the
   client's IP address with the closest CDN surrogate, both for DNS or
   HTTP redirect based approaches (see, for instance,
   [I-D.penno-alto-cdn]).  This matching is not trivial, for instance,
   in DNS based approaches, where the IP address of the DNS original
   requester is unknown (see [I-D.vandergaast-edns-client-ip] for a
   discussion of this and a solution approach).

5.2.  Deployment Recommendations

5.2.1.  ALTO Services

   In its simplest form an ALTO server would provide an NSP with the
   capability to offer a service to a CDN that provides network map and
   cost information.  The CDN can use that data to enhance its surrogate
   and/or origin selection.  An alternative would be the Endpoint Cost
   Service (ECS).

   If an NSP offers an ALTO network and cost map service to expose a
   cost mapping/ranking between end user IP subnets (within that NSP's
   network) and CDN surrogate IP subnets/locations, periodic updates of
   the maps may be needed.  It is common for broadband subscribers to
   obtain their IP addresses dynamically and in many deployments the IP
   subnets allocated to a particular network region can change
   relatively frequently, even if the network topology itself is
   reasonably static.

   An alternative would be to use the ALTO Endpoint Cost Service (ECS):
   When an end user request a given content, the CDN request router
   issues an ECS request with the endpoint address (IPv4/IPv6) of the
   end user (content requester) and the set of endpoint addresses of the
   surrogate (content targets).  The ALTO server receives the request
   and ranks the list of content targets addresses based on their
   distance from the content requester.  Once the request router
   obtained from the ALTO Server the ranked list of locations (for the
   specific user), it can incorporate this information into its
   selection mechanisms in order to point the user to the most
   appropriate surrogate.

   When ALTO server receives an ECS request, it may not have the most
   appropriate topology information in order to accurately determine the
   ranking.  In such a case the ALTO server may want to adopt the
   following strategies:

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   o  Reply with available information (best effort).

   o  Redirect the request to another ALTO server presumed to have
      better topology information (redirection).

   o  Doing both (best effort and redirection).  In this case, the reply
      message contains both the rankings and the indication of another
      ALTO server where more accurate rankings may be delivered.

   The decision process that is used to determine if redirection is
   necessary and which mode to use is out of the scope of this document.

   Since CDNs operate in a controlled environment, the ALTO network/cost
   map service and ECS have a similar level of security and
   confidentiality of network-internal information.  However, the
   network/cost map service and ECS differ in the way the ALTO service
   is delivered and address a different set of requirements in terms of
   topology information and network operations.

   In order to address the scalability limitations of ECS and to reduce
   the number of transactions between CDN and ALTO server, a request
   router that uses ECS could cache the results of ECS queries for later
   usage.  The ALTO server may indicate in the reply message how long
   the content of the message is to be considered reliable and insert a
   lifetime value that will be used by the CDN in order to cache (and
   then flush or refresh) the entry.

5.2.2.  Guidance Considerations

   In the following, some deployment scenarios for ALTO are outlined, as
   examples to demonstrate how a CDN could make use of ALTO services.

   In one deployment scenarion, ALTO could expose NSP end user
   reachability to a CDN.  The request router needs to have information
   on which end user IP subnets are reachable via which networks or
   network locations.  The network map services offered by ALTO could be
   used to expose this topology information while avoiding routing plane
   peering between the NSP and the CDN.  For example, if CDN surrogates
   are deployed within the access or aggregation network, the NSP is
   likely to want to utilise the surrogates deployed in the same access/
   aggregation region in preference to surrogates deployed elsewhere, in
   order to alleviate the cost and/or improve the user experience.

   In addition, CDN surrogates could use ALTO guidance as well, e.g., if
   there is more than one upstream source of content or several origins.
   ALTO could help a surrogate with the decision which upstream source
   to use.

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   If content can be provided by several CDNs, there may be a need to
   interconnect these CDNs.  In this case, ALTO can be uses as interface
   [I-D.seedorf-cdni-request-routing-alto], in particular for footprint
   and capabilities advertisement interface.  As explained in
   [I-D.seedorf-cdni-request-routing-alto], this specific variant of
   using ALTO requires protocol extensions and is therefore not further
   detailed in this document.

   Other and more advanced scenarios of deploying ALTO are also listed
   in [I-D.jenkins-alto-cdn-use-cases] and [I-D.penno-alto-cdn].

   The granularity of ALTO information required depends on the specific
   deployment of the CDN.  For example, an over-the-top CDN whose
   surrogates are deployed only within the Internet "backbone" may only
   require knowledge of which end user IP subnets are reachable via
   which NSPs' networks, whereas a CDN deployed within a particular
   NSP's network requires a finer granularity of knowledge.

   ALTO server ranks addresses based on topology information it acquires
   from the network.  By default, according to [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol],
   distance in ALTO represents the routing cost as computed by the
   routing layer (e.g., OSPF, ISIS, BGP), but it may also take into
   consideration other routing criteria such as MPLS-VPN (MP-BGP) and
   MPLS-TE (RSVP), policy and state and performance information in
   addition to other information sources (policy, geo-location, state,
   and performance), as explained in Section 3.2.1.

   The different methods and algorithms through which the ALTO server
   computes topology information and rankings is out of the scope of
   this document.  However, and in the case the rankings are based on
   routing (IP/MPLS) topology, it is obvious that network events may
   impact the ranking computation.  Due to internal redundancy and
   resilience mechanisms inside current networks, most of the network
   events happening in the infrastructure will have limited impact on a
   CDN.  However, catastrophic events such as main trunks failures or
   backbone partition will have to take into account by the ALTO server
   so to redirect traffic away from the failure impacted area.  An ALTO
   server implementation may want to keep state about ALTO clients so to
   inform and signal to these clients when a major network event
   happened so to clear the ALTO cache in the client.  In a CDN/ALTO
   interworking architecture where there's a few CDN component
   interacting with the ALTO server there are no scalability issues in
   maintaining state about clients in the ALTO server.

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6.  Other Use Cases

   This section briefly surveys and references other use cases that have
   been suggested for ALTO.

6.1.  Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)

   Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology is widely used in public and
   private networks to create groups of users that are separated from
   other users of the network and allows these users to communicate
   among them as if they were on a private network.  Network Service
   Providers (NSPs) offer different types of VPNs.  [RFC4026]
   distinguishes between Layer 2 VPN (L2VPN) and Layer 3 VPN (L3VPN)
   using different sub-types.  In the following, the term "VPN" is used
   to refer to provider supplied virtual private networking.

   ALTO topology exposure is also very useful for providing application
   guidance in VPNs, so that applications do not have to perform
   excessive measurements on their own.  For instance, potential use
   cases for ALTO optimization over VPNs are:

   o  Enterprise application optimization: Enterprise customers often
      run distributed applications that exchange large amounts of data,
      e.g., for synchronization of replicated data bases.  Both for
      placement of replicas as well as for the scheduling of transfers
      insight into network topology information could be useful.

   o  Private cloud computing solution: An enterprise customer could run
      own data centers at the four sites.  The cloud management system
      could want to understand the network costs between different sites
      for intelligent routing and placement decisions of Virtual
      Machines (VMs) among the VPN sites.

   o  Cloud-bursting: One or more VPN endpoints could be located in a
      public cloud.  If an enterprise customer needs additional
      resources, they could be provided by a public cloud, which is
      accessed through the VPN.  Network topology awareness would help
      to decide in which data center of the public cloud those resources
      should be allocated.

   These examples focus on enterprise customers of NSPs, which are
   typical users of provider-supplied VPNs.  Such VPN customers
   typically have no insight into the network topology that transports
   the VPN.  If better-than-random decisions would be enabled by an ALTO
   server offered by the NSP, as illustrated in Figure Figure 21.

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                       +---------------+
                       |  Customer's   |
                       |   management  |
                       |  application  |.
                       | (ALTO client) |  .
                       +---------------+    .  VPN provisioning
                               ^              . (out-of-scope)
                               | ALTO           .
                               V                  .
                    +---------------------+       +----------------+
                    |     ALTO server     |       | VPN portal/OSS |
                    |   provided by NSP   |       | (out-of-scope) |
                    +---------------------+       +----------------+
                               ^ VPN network
                               * and cost maps
                               *
                     /---------*---------\ Network service provider
                     |         *         |
        +-------+   _______________________   +-------+
        | App a | ()_____. .________. .____() | App d |
        +-------+    |   | |        | |  |    +-------+
                     \---| |--------| |--/
                         | |        | |
                         |^|        |^| Customer VPN
                          V          V
                      +-------+  +-------+
                      | App b |  | App c |
                      +-------+  +-------+

                       Figure 21: Using ALTO in VPNs

   A common characteristic of these use cases is that applications will
   not necessarily run in the public Internet, and that the relationship
   between the provider and customer of the VPN is rather well-defined.
   Since VPNs run often in a managed environment, an ALTO server may
   have access to topology information (e.g., traffic engineering data)
   that would not be available for the public Internet, and it may
   expose it to the customer of the VPN only.

   Also, A VPN will not necessarily be static.  The customer could
   possibly modify the VPN and add new VPN sites by a Web portal or
   other Operation Support Systems (OSS) solutions.  Prior to adding a
   new VPN site, an application will not be have connectivity to that
   site, i.e., an ALTO server could offer access to information that an
   application cannot measure on its own (e.g., expected delay to a new
   VPN site).

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   The VPN use cases, requirements, and solutions are further detailed
   in [I-D.scharf-alto-vpn-service].

6.2.  In-Network Caching

   Deployment of intra-domain P2P caches has been proposed for a
   cooperations between the network operator and the P2P service
   providers, e.g., to reduce the bandwith consumption in access
   networks [I-D.deng-alto-p2pcache].

      +--------------+                +------+
      | ISP 1 network+----------------+Peer 1|
      +-----+--------+                +------+
      |
   +--------+------------------------------------------------------+
   |        |                                      ISP 2 network   |
   |  +---------+                                                  |
   |  |L1 Cache |                                                  |
   |  +-----+---+                                                  |
   |        +--------------------+----------------------+          |
   |        |                    |                      |          |
   | +------+------+      +------+-------+       +------+-------+  |
   | | AN1         |      | AN2          |       | AN3          |  |
   | | +---------+ |      | +----------+ |       |              |  |
   | | |L2 Cache | |      | |L2 Cache  | |       |              |  |
   | | +---------+ |      | +----------+ |       |              |  |
   | +------+------+      +------+-------+       +------+-------+  |
   |        |                                           |          |
   |        +--------------------+                      |          |
   |        |                    |                      |          |
   | +------+------+      +------+-------+       +------+-------+  |
   | | SUB-AN11    |      | SUB-AN12     |       | SUB-AN31     |  |
   | | +---------+ |      |              |       |              |  |
   | | |L3 Cache | |      |              |       |              |  |
   | | +---------+ |      |              |       |              |  |
   | +------+------+      +------+-------+       +------+-------+  |
   |        |                    |                      |          |
   +--------+--------------------+----------------------+----------+
            |                    |                      |
        +---+---+            +---+---+                  |
        |       |            |       |                  |
     +--+--+ +--+--+      +--+--+ +--+--+            +--+--+
     |Peer2| |Peer3|      |Peer4| |Peer5|            |Peer6|
     +-----+ +-----+      +-----+ +-----+            +-----+

            Figure 22: General architecture of intra-ISP caches

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   Figure 22 depics the overall architecture of a potential P2P cache
   deployments inside an ISP 2 with various access network types.  As
   shown in the figure, P2P caches may be deployed at various levels,
   including the interworking gateway linking with other ISPs, internal
   access network gateways linking with different types of accessing
   networks (e.g. WLAN, cellular and wired), and even within an
   accessing network at the entries of individual WLAN sub-networks.
   Moreover, depending on the network context and the operator's policy,
   each cache can be a Forwarding Cache or a Bidirectional Cache
   [I-D.deng-alto-p2pcache].

   In such a cache architecture, the locations of caches could be used
   as dividers of different PIDs to guide intra-ISP network abstraction
   and mark costs among them according to the location and type of
   relevant caches.

   Further details and deployment considerations can be found in
   [I-D.deng-alto-p2pcache].

6.3.  Other Use Cases

   TODO

7.  Security Considerations

   The ALTO protocol itself as well as the ALTO client and server raise
   new security issues beyond the ones mentioned in
   [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol] and issues related to message transport over
   the Internet.  For instance, Denial of Service (DoS) is of interest
   for the ALTO server and also for the ALTO client.  A server can get
   overloaded if too many TCP requests hit the server, or if the query
   load of the server surpasses the maximum computing capacity.  An ALTO
   client can get overloaded if the responses from the sever are, either
   intentionally or due to an implementation mistake, too large to be
   handled by that particular client.

   This section is solely giving a first shot on security issues related
   to ALTO deployments.

7.1.  Information Leakage from the ALTO Server

   The ALTO server will be provisioned with information about the owning
   ISP's network and very likely also with information about neighboring
   ISPs.  This information (e.g., network topology, business relations,
   etc.) is considered to be confidential to the ISP and must not be
   revealed.

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   The ALTO server will naturally reveal parts of that information in
   small doses to peers, as the guidance given will depend on the above
   mentioned information.  This is seen beneficial for both parties,
   i.e., the ISP's and the peer's. However, there is the chance that one
   or multiple peers are querying an ALTO server with the goal to gather
   information about network topology or any other data considered
   confidential or at least sensitive.  It is unclear whether this is a
   real technical security risk or whether this is more a perceived
   security risk.

7.2.  ALTO Server Access

   Depending on the use case of ALTO, several access restrictions to an
   ALTO server may or may not apply.

   For peer-to-peer applications, a potential deployment scenario is
   that an ALTO server is solely accessible by peers from the ISP
   network (as shown in Figure 16).  For instance, the source IP address
   can be used to grant only access from that ISP network to the server.
   This will "limit" the number of peers able to attack the server to
   the user's of the ISP (however, including botnet computers).

   If the ALTO server has to be accessible by parties not located in the
   ISP's network (see Figure Figure 15), e.g., by a third-party tracker
   or by a CDN system outside the ISP's network, the access restrictions
   have to be looser.  In the extreme case, i.e., no access
   restrictions, each and every host in the Internet can access the ALTO
   server.  This might no be the intention of the ISP, as the server is
   not only subject to more possible attacks, but also on the load
   imposed to the server, i.e., possibly more ALTO clients to serve and
   thus more work load.

   There are also use cases where the access to the ALTO server has to
   be much more strictly controlled, i. e., where an authentication and
   authorization of the ALTO client to the server may be needed.  For
   instance, in case of CDN optimization the provider of an ALTO service
   as well as potential users are possibly well-known.  Only CDN
   entities may need ALTO access; access to the ALTO servers by
   residential users may neither be necessary nor be desired.

7.3.  Faking ALTO Guidance

   It has not yet been investigated how a faked or wrong ALTO guidance
   by an ALTO server can impact the operation of the network and also
   the peers.

   Here is a list of examples how the ALTO guidance could be faked and
   what possible consequences may arise:

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   Sorting  An attacker could change to sorting order of the ALTO
      guidance (given that the order is of importance, otherwise the
      ranking mechanism is of interest), i.e., declaring peers located
      outside the ISP as peers to be preferred.  This will not pose a
      big risk to the network or peers, as it would mimic the "regular"
      peer operation without traffic localization, apart from the
      communication/processing overhead for ALTO.  However, it could
      mean that ALTO is reaching the opposite goal of shuffling more
      data across ISP boundaries, incurring more costs for the ISP.

   Preference of a single peer  A single IP address (thus a peer) could
      be marked as to be preferred all over other peers.  This peer can
      be located within the local ISP or also in other parts of the
      Internet (e.g., a web server).  This could lead to the case that
      quite a number of peers to trying to contact this IP address,
      possibly causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

8.  IANA Considerations

   This document makes no specific request to IANA.

9.  Conclusion

   This document discusses how the ALTO protocol can be deployed in
   different use cases and provides corresponding guidance and
   recommendations to network administrators and application developers.

10.  References

10.1.  Normative References

   [RFC3568]  Barbir, A., Cain, B., Nair, R., and O. Spatscheck, "Known
              Content Network (CN) Request-Routing Mechanisms", RFC
              3568, July 2003.

10.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.deng-alto-p2pcache]
              Lingli, D., Chen, W., Yi, Q., and Y. Zhang,
              "Considerations for ALTO with network-deployed P2P
              caches", draft-deng-alto-p2pcache-02 (work in progress),
              July 2013.

   [I-D.farrkingel-pce-abno-architecture]
              King, D. and A. Farrel, "A PCE-based Architecture for
              Application-based Network Operations", draft-farrkingel-
              pce-abno-architecture-06 (work in progress), October 2013.

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   [I-D.ietf-alto-protocol]
              Alimi, R., Penno, R., and Y. Yang, "ALTO Protocol", draft-
              ietf-alto-protocol-25 (work in progress), January 2014.

   [I-D.ietf-alto-server-discovery]
              Kiesel, S., Stiemerling, M., Schwan, N., Scharf, M., and
              S. Yongchao, "ALTO Server Discovery", draft-ietf-alto-
              server-discovery-10 (work in progress), September 2013.

   [I-D.ietf-i2rs-architecture]
              Atlas, A., Halpern, J., Hares, S., Ward, D., and T.
              Nadeau, "An Architecture for the Interface to the Routing
              System", draft-ietf-i2rs-architecture-01 (work in
              progress), February 2014.

   [I-D.ietf-idr-ls-distribution]
              Gredler, H., Medved, J., Previdi, S., Farrel, A., and S.
              Ray, "North-Bound Distribution of Link-State and TE
              Information using BGP", draft-ietf-idr-ls-distribution-04
              (work in progress), November 2013.

   [I-D.jenkins-alto-cdn-use-cases]
              Niven-Jenkins, B., Watson, G., Bitar, N., Medved, J., and
              S. Previdi, "Use Cases for ALTO within CDNs", draft-
              jenkins-alto-cdn-use-cases-03 (work in progress), June
              2012.

   [I-D.kamei-p2p-experiments-japan]
              Kamei, S., Momose, T., Inoue, T., and T. Nishitani, "ALTO-
              Like Activities and Experiments in P2P Network Experiment
              Council", draft-kamei-p2p-experiments-japan-09 (work in
              progress), October 2012.

   [I-D.kiesel-alto-h12]
              Kiesel, S. and M. Stiemerling, "ALTO H12", draft-kiesel-
              alto-h12-02 (work in progress), March 2010.

   [I-D.kist-alto-3pdisc]
              Kiesel, S., Krause, K., and M. Stiemerling, "Third-Party
              ALTO Server Discovery (3pdisc)", draft-kist-alto-3pdisc-05
              (work in progress), January 2014.

   [I-D.lee-alto-chinatelecom-trial]
              Li, K. and G. Jian, "ALTO and DECADE service trial within
              China Telecom", draft-lee-alto-chinatelecom-trial-04 (work
              in progress), March 2012.

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   [I-D.penno-alto-cdn]
              Penno, R., Medved, J., Alimi, R., Yang, R., and S.
              Previdi, "ALTO and Content Delivery Networks", draft-
              penno-alto-cdn-03 (work in progress), March 2011.

   [I-D.scharf-alto-vpn-service]
              Scharf, M., Gurbani, V., Soprovich, G., and V. Hilt, "The
              Virtual Private Network (VPN) Service in ALTO: Use Cases,
              Requirements and Extensions", draft-scharf-alto-vpn-
              service-01 (work in progress), July 2013.

   [I-D.seedorf-cdni-request-routing-alto]
              Seedorf, J. and Y. Yang, "CDNI Footprint and Capabilities
              Advertisement using ALTO", draft-seedorf-cdni-request-
              routing-alto-05 (work in progress), October 2013.

   [I-D.vandergaast-edns-client-ip]
              Contavalli, C., Gaast, W., Leach, S., and D. Rodden,
              "Client IP information in DNS requests", draft-
              vandergaast-edns-client-ip-01 (work in progress), May
              2010.

   [RFC4026]  Andersson, L. and T. Madsen, "Provider Provisioned Virtual
              Private Network (VPN) Terminology", RFC 4026, March 2005.

   [RFC5632]  Griffiths, C., Livingood, J., Popkin, L., Woundy, R., and
              Y. Yang, "Comcast's ISP Experiences in a Proactive Network
              Provider Participation for P2P (P4P) Technical Trial", RFC
              5632, September 2009.

   [RFC5693]  Seedorf, J. and E. Burger, "Application-Layer Traffic
              Optimization (ALTO) Problem Statement", RFC 5693, October
              2009.

   [RFC6708]  Kiesel, S., Previdi, S., Stiemerling, M., Woundy, R., and
              Y. Yang, "Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO)
              Requirements", RFC 6708, September 2012.

Appendix A.  Contributing Authors and Acknowledgments

   This memo is the result of contributions made by several people, such
   as:

   o  Xianghue Sun, Lee Kai, and Richard Yang contributed text on ISP
      deployment requirements and monitoring.

   o  Stefano Previdi contributed parts of the Section 5 on "Using ALTO
      for CDNs".

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   o  Rich Woundy contributed text to Section 3.3.

   o  Lingli Deng, Wei Chen, Qiuchao Yi, Yan Zhang contributed
      Section 6.2.

   The authors would like to thank Thomas-Rolf Banniza, Vinayak Hegde,
   and Qin Wu for useful comments and reviews of the document.

   Martin Stiemerling is partially supported by the CHANGE project (
   http://www.change-project.eu), a research project supported by the
   European Commission under its 7th Framework Program (contract no.
   257422).  The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the
   authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the
   official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of
   the CHANGE project or the European Commission.

Authors' Addresses

   Martin Stiemerling (editor)
   NEC Laboratories Europe
   Kurfuerstenanlage 36
   Heidelberg  69115
   Germany

   Phone: +49 6221 4342 113
   Fax:   +49 6221 4342 155
   Email: martin.stiemerling@neclab.eu
   URI:   http://ietf.stiemerling.org

   Sebastian Kiesel (editor)
   University of Stuttgart, Computing Center
   Allmandring 30
   Stuttgart  70550
   Germany

   Email: ietf-alto@skiesel.de

   Stefano Previdi
   Cisco Systems, Inc.
   Via Del Serafico 200
   Rome  00191
   Italy

   Email: sprevidi@cisco.com

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   Michael Scharf
   Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs
   Lorenzstrasse 10
   Stuttgart  70435
   Germany

   Email: michael.scharf@alcatel-lucent.com

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