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As if P2P wasn't bad enough, now researchers have come up with a more efficient way to fileshare
Jason Mick (Blog) - May 29, 2008 9:32 AM
Daily tech The international community may be preparing to launch the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which will force ISPs to log filesharing and hand over user records to the government, will eliminate privacy tools, and allow ex parte border searches, but there is some good news on the horizon. Researchers at Yale have come up with a breakthrough in file sharing technology. The new system coordinates Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software providers to raise internet efficiency, and perhaps file transfer speeds.
Changes in internet usage over the last 10 years have put a severe strain on the world's computers, causing them to run less efficiently and putting stress on overall internet bandwidth. In 1998, P2P traffic accounted for only 10 percent of the total traffic on an average network. Today it accounts for as much as 70 percent. Web browsing, which once accounted for 60 percent of traffic has fallen to 20 percent, email from 10 percent down to 5 percent.
Professors Avi Silberschatz, Y. Richard Yang, and Ph.D. candidate Haiyong Xie, faculty members at Yale's Department of Computer Science, are developing a new proposed standard known as P4P. P4P stands for “provider portal for P2P applications”. The system would make for more explicit and uninterrupted communications between ISPs and P2P applications.
The team will be presenting their findings in a paper at the premier Seattle computer networking class ACM SIGCOMM 2008 in August. In the paper, they detail how P4P will reduce cost for ISPs and improve P2P performance for normal users. Silberschatz explains -- current P2P technologies do not have a sense of what network they're on and may do ridiculous things like making a long distance call to connect to a neighbor when transferring a file. The lack of intelligence translates in money lost for the ISPs, particularly for users with "unlimited" connections, and in time lost for the consumer, who could be receiving the file faster. [Daily Tech...] [Comments...] |
