P2Ps and ISPs team to tame file-sharing traffic

If widely adopted, executives involved in the effort say, it could save both content providers and platform operators significant bandwidth cost beyond those already achieved by using current peer-to-peer architecture.

The group, dubbed the P4P Working Group, is being spearheaded by Verizon and Pando Networks, a leading P2P network, and is supported by the Distributed Computing Industry Assn. (DCIA). The DCIA helped organize a meeting for new members of the group at the Consumer Electronics Show here.

At a briefing for DCIA members Sunday, Verizon and Pando officials said interest in the project from both the ISP and P2P sides is growing.

The genesis for the project came from theoretical work on network architecture published last year by researchers at Yale.

The research described a method for containing peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic with a single ISP’s local network.

Currently, P2P services typically search for, and often draw files requested by their users from across their entire networks, which can span continents. The more links between Internet networks a file has to traverse, however, the higher the cost to the destination ISP, since network operators typically charge each other inter-connection fees to pass data back and forth.

The researchers figured out that if a peer-to-peer network had better knowledge of a local ISP’s topography, it could reliably locate the requested file within local network. Using that approach, P2P traffic could be confined to the edges of the network, rather than having to traverse the rest of the Internet.

ISPs are typically reluctant to share that kind of information about their network with applications developers. But sensing the possibility of significant cost savings, Verizon and AT&T have both signed onto the P4P Working Group.

Verizon Technology Group principal engineer Doug Pasko described the alliance with P2P providers as a marriage of convenience.

“We know we’re going to have this traffic on our network,” he said of P2P-based file-sharing. “It’s a huge part of our volume now. When we saw the Yale research and realized what it could mean in terms of cost savings, we decided we needed to come up with a way to share our topographical information in a way to make it possible.”

In addition to Verizon and AT&T, Telefonica Group, Washington University, Yale and Cisco Systems have signed on from the ISP world. P2P participants include BitTorrent, Joost, LimeWire, Manatt and RawFlow in addition to Pando.

In simulations run by Telefonica, average “hop counts” per block of data using P4P architecture fell my more than 50% compared to traditional P2P architecture.

According to Pando co-founder Laird Popkin, the advantage to the end user from P4P architecture is faster downloads and better quality service, issues that will become increasingly important as legitimate online video distributors adopt peer-to-peer technology to manage their bandwidth use.

Average download times dropped by as much as 40% in the Telefonica simulations, particularly as the number of peers on the network grew.

Better management of P2P traffic, in turn, will reduce the incentive for ISPs to throttle P2P services, as Comcast was recently accused of doing to BitTorrent, according to Popkin.

“We’re trying to solve problems before we have to cope with them,” he said.

Not yet fully on board are the major cable ISPs.

Cablevision, Time Warner Cable and Comcast have “observer” status within the working group but have not yet agreed to share topographical information about their networks.

“They’re being cautious, but I think they’ll eventually get involved directly,” DCIA president Marty Lafferty said.