RSS'P4P' could double P2P transfer speeds
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published March 17, 2008, 3:41 PM
In results unveiled Friday at DCIA's P2P Market Conference in New York City, P4P technology was shown to enhance download rates by 205 percent over unmanaged P2P downloads.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - After achieving much faster than usual download and data delivery rates in a field trial with Verizon and Pando, the P4P Working Group is now looking at doing trials with other ISPs and P2P network providers, said Haiyong Xie, a Working Group member who is also a Ph.D. student at Yale.
The trial made use of Xie's implementation of P4P networking principals, Pando's application plattform, and network topology data from Verizon.
Essentially, P4P is designed to speed up P2P downloads by localizing network traffic and reducing the numbers of routers and transfers needed for distributing data. Among the other statistics released here Friday, the Working Group said it could decrease the average number of hops needed in ISP internal data delivery from 5.5 to 0.89.
"Before doing this field trial, we'd conducted simulations. But results of the trial prove that P4P also works in the real world," said Laird Popkings of Pando Networks, co-chair of the P4P Working Group, speaking with BetaNews at the event in Manhattan.
A similar field trial is still under way with Pando -- a company which partners with NBC Direct, for example, on P2P content delivery -- and Spanish-based ISP Telefonica. Results from the Telefonica trial are expected over the next week or two.
3:30 pm EDT March 17, 2008 - P4P can benefit content providers, too, according to Popkin. The costs of delivering content across multiple hops can run high, especially for video, he said.
"But different P2P networks have different properties, as do different ISPs," said Xie. "We're also interested in seeing how the P4P technology works with other P2P networks and with other ISPs."
When asked by BetaNews for some examples of other P2P networks the group might target, Xie mentioned BitTorrent and Sold State Networks as some possibilities.
The P4P Working Group has evolved from the New York P2P 2.0 Meetup, first held in June of 2007.
At that meeting, Xie first presented his research on the benefits of "Proactive Provider Assistance for P2P."
NBC Direct is delivering TV programs such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno over the Internet via P2P.
P4P: dumbest marketing name ever (and clueless at that).
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Except for the fact that it basically makes sense.
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Peer for Peer?
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a lot of ISP's don't want to incorperate systems that monitors or trace packets of information, because of security and also goverments then demanding ISP's analyse those packets and determing if illegal sharing is going on,
this P4P sounds to me like a ISP has to analyse the host I.P. and determing where it's going Destination I.P., well if that is the case, i can't see many ISP's opting for this kind of technology, because it would mean, every bit of info being sent out, is being analysed by the ISP we are with, the security remifications on this to me sounds not a good idea, there are many people sending out very confidential information to people using P2P technology, i for one would not like my ISP analysing where that info is going, and how to optimize the jumps (hops),
the idea is sound, but P2P has always given people Anonymity, and ISP's are already under a lot of preasure from goverments to deploy stricter measures of what people are sending and recieving, but ISP's have to also give there coustomers freedom at the same time,
i feel a ISP is there to give a service, not to dictate what information is allowed to be sent and recieved, i feel that goverments are trying to solve the problem of piracy by making it ISP's problem, but where does it end, before you know it, goverments will be telling ISP's to analyse and log everyone's internet activities and share this info with goverments,
already even my post has become very controversial, which i fear P4P will do aswell,
the idea is sound, as P2P is inneficient, but ISP's should not have systems in place that monitors peoples packets, and where then coming and going to,
all i can say is, now is not a good time to be a ISP, hehehehe
but this P4P technology is intriguing i must admit, will keep an eye for this, to see where it goes,
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It's pretty obvious that eventually ISPs will "encourage" users (actually their software & OS) to transfer as much data as possible from/to "cheap" destinations (lowest hops) by increasing the upstream/downstream rates to those physically nearby destinations only. It makes no sense for a packet going halfway around the world to be pushed out to the internet at the same rate of a packet pushed to someone in the same neighborhood (possibly not ever going on the internet but rather always staying on the ISP's intranets)...
You can send to the neighbor your entire harddrive 50x a day and it shouldn't have any effect on the internet (and on other neighbors, assuming proper QoS is employed). But..if you sent the same amount of data to someone overseas, you're talking about severely burdening multiple ISPs in between, including your own ISP of course.
So.. once ISPs make that policy the standard, P4P and similar concepts will encourage users to share resources with other neighbors. For example, you let me backup 20GB of my data on your harddrive, and I let you backup your data on my drive (all encrypted of course). Another example, let me super-quickly upload to a neighbor that torrent file so I maintain my mandatory 1:1 share ratio on that private torrent site, instead of uploading much much slower to someone in a diff country.
Uploading to a neighbor (ISP intranet or very close to it) should actually simultaneously free my upstream to the real internet (more further hops) - in other words intranet use should not count against your internet usage as far as xfer rate is concerned. This will be another incentive the ISPs will give customers to use software designed to push as much data as possible to others on the ISP's intranet(s) or other cheap networks they'll integrate...
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VERIZON AND NBC TV CREATE P4P
What a joke this "news" is. Verizon and NBC TV hired a Chinese exchange student to create a proprietary P2P network (P4P), so they can market it to Americans.
They claim they have bandwidth problems with present day P2P networks (a lie), and they now have to put advertising into P4P TV show downloads.
What's really sick is the media wh***s (journalists) who publish these corporate "news" stories. These articles always have a spin to them (with more lies).
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Here's the door, then.
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Should have linked slashdot.
...or digg. :p
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Wiki
http://www.slate.com/id/2184487?from=rss
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Now why'd you have to go and do that?
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Because it's true?
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This is a great write-up, thanks!
A few responses to comments:
Ingram091: Actually P4P's benefit is greatest in the largest swarms. Current p2p typically connects random peers, which means that for large swarms you're quite unlikely to connect initially to anyone near you. For example, if there are 10,000 peers in a BitTorrent swarm, you connect to a random 50, so you're 99.5% likely not to connect to the "best" peer. So if you find out about another 50 random peers a minute (which is much faster that most Trackers), you'll take 200 minutes to find 50% of the swarm. But with P4P the Tracker has enough information to be able to make guided peering suggestions, so you can start immediately with the closest/best peers, rather than starting slowly and gradually finding better seeds and speeding up over hours. The result is that users get much faster downloads sooner.
Davidlerner: Good question. Comcast and Cox are in the P4P Working Group, so we hope to learn more about how this works for them soon. We also have some wireless carriers involved, which is another interesting scenario.
Scary Guy: P4P is a means for ISP's to provide guidance to P2P networks so that they can make good choices about which peers to connect. It isn't a p2p protocol, and it doesn't change p2p protocols.
sjc001: P4P doesn't change the protocol used by the p2p network, so there's no security implication there.
There is more information at http://www.pandonetworks.com/p4p and at http://www.dcia.info/activities. Participation in the Working Group is free and open to all ISP's, P2P companies and researchers. For more information about participation, contact:
Co-chairs laird@pando.com and doug.pasko@verizon.net, or the head of the DCIA, the host organization, marty@dcia.info.
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Again I'm comparing speeds here. P2P over Tor is slow, but secure. Standard P2P is more secure than P4P from what it sounds like.
Also from what it sounds like it's still "Peer to Peer", the technology is just different in how that's done which is where the fancy name comes from. So they're both P2P, but only the new one will be P4P.
This sounds like a fancy bittorent replacement that can be monitored by large companies that create the content and transfer data. I think I'll pass.
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So Shrinking the Vivaldi cloud basically right? Making it more localized? IDK I suppose that would be better. However I can not imagine getting much faster speeds then I already get for things. I just always make sure there are plenty of participating seeds before I take part in the project. Especially for Linux updates. Cause they are unbelievably fast for me. and seeding is a light load cause of the thousands of seeds.
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won be hearing anything from comcast about this anytime soon. will this affect torrents?
www.talkprice.net
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Yeah, I'm wondering if it will make P2P over Tor work like standard P2P without proxies.
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Tor will never localize nodes/tunnels. Beats the whole purpose, since it allows the ISP to locate and pinpoint the anonymous nodes given sufficient time and hardware.
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I'm comparing speeds here. P2P over Tor is slow, but secure. Standard P2P is more secure than P4P from what it sounds like.
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Tor was not designed for P2P and is being heavily abused by such traffic.
The onion routers used by the Tor network are run by volunteers using their own bandwidth at their own cost.
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They're being abused simply because it's secure. None of us want to go to jail or pay fines.
Also I know very well the issues and help to contribute to the solution (everyone runs an onion) as well as the problem.
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None of us want to go to jail or pay fines.
Hmmm.. How about not breaking the law? Seems like a simple enough solution.
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Many can't afford to do that. A good portion of US citizens are in poverty these days. They can't afford a great many things including entertainment expenses. They steal cable TV, cheat on their taxes, don't pay the parking meters, and skip out on the bill at restaurants and pull drive off's at gas stations. We do everything we can to cheat the system because the system does everything it can to cheat us out of hard earned money. Hell people in the inner city are working and on top of that collecting wellfair and food stamps.
Also not breaking the law is a lot easier than it sounds. You're always breaking some law because if you aren't they can't make any money off you.
A couple movies/mp3's here and there aren't going to make any difference.
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What's security like?
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