Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Yale marries ISP with P2P, births ‘P4P’ for a faster web

By Mass High Tech

Researchers at Yale University have created a better bridge between Internet service providers (ISPs) and peer-to-peer (P2P) software applications that school officials say can help speed up the Internet.

According to officials at the New Haven, Conn.-based Ivy League school, the percentage of Internet traffic used to download and upload large chunks of data — say, DVD movies or MP3 albums — using P2P software has increased from less than 10 percent in 1998 to greater than 70 percent in many networks this year.

Professors Avi Silberschatz and Y. Richard Yang, and Ph.D. candidate Haiyong Xie in Yale’s Department of Computer Science are part of the research team that wants the web to adopt a new architecture called P4P — which stands for “provider portal for P2P applications” — to allow direct communications between ISPs and P2P applications.

According to Silberschatz, the P4P architecture extends the Internet architecture by providing servers the group calls iTrackers to individual ISPs. The servers act as P2P portals to the ISP networks.

The Yale researchers said that, in a March field test using P2P software from Pando Networks of New York City, P4P reduced traffic between ISPs by an average of 34 percent and increased delivery speeds to end users by up to 235 percent across networks in the United States and up to 898 percent across international networks.