14 DAY TRIAL // A group of researchers from the universities of Washington and Yale have announced that they plan to develop a new file sharing system to replace the popular peer-to-peer. The idea behind P4P is that files should be transferred mostly between people from the same area, to avoid network congestions. "Right now the choice of P2P source is random: A college student in a dorm room would be as likely to download a piece of a file from someone in Japan as from a classmate down the hall," says a University of Washington press release.
"Initial tests have shown that network load could be reduced by a factor of five or more without compromising network performance," says co-author Arvind Krishnamurthy, a UW research assistant professor of computer science and engineering. "At the same time, speeds are increased by about 20 percent."
This perfectly works out in the case of multi-seed files, because, within the same network, people are more likely to download at faster speed. But when users try to download files that have an insignificant number of seeds and most of the already few seeders come from the other corner of the globe, a fast download may be more difficult to reach.
The P4P project relies on the support of both Internet providers and companies to give the content to be shared within the network. This could mean that copyrighted files, which contribute now to most of the illegal traffic registered by bittorrent clients, could be banned from the new system. This may not be in the best advantage of bittorrent clients, which, no matter what the official statements are, still rely upon pirated content sharing. ISPs might support though P4P, as the cost induced by a connection between seeders found one mile away from each other is smaller than the one covering greater distances.
"For the networks considered in the field tests, researchers calculated that the average peer-to-peer data packet currently travels 1,000 miles and takes 5.5 metro-hops, which are connections through major hubs. With the new system, data traveled 160 miles on average and, more importantly, made just 0.89 metro-hops, dramatically reducing Web traffic on arteries between cities where bottlenecks are most likely to occur," reveals the official report, underscoring the advantages that P4P would bring.