ACM TechNews

The 160-Mile Download Diet: Local File-Sharing Drastically Cuts Network Load

University of Washington News and Information (08/19/08) Hickey, Hannah; Muzzin, Suzanne

University of Washington (UW) and Yale University researchers have proposed P4P, an approach to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing in which users share preferentially with nearby computers. Such a system would allow P2P traffic to continue to grow without crippling the Internet, and could provide a basis for future P2P systems. A paper on P4P will be presented at ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communications conference. Paper co-author and UW professor Arvind Krinshamurthy says initial tests indicate that the network load could be reduced by a factor of five or more without compromising network performance, while simultaneously increasing speeds by about 20 percent. In traditional P2P networks, on average, data packets travel 1,000 miles and take 5.5 metro-hops, which are connections through major hubs. In the P4P network, data packets traveled 160 miles on average and made only 0.89 metro-hops, significantly reducing Web traffic on routes between cities where bottlenecks are most likely to occur. Tests show that only 6 percent of file-sharing is currently done locally, while in a P4P network, local file-sharing increased to 58 percent. P4P require more cooperation between the ISP and the file-sharing host, but it does not force companies to disclose information on how they route Internet traffic.

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=43281

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