Computer Scientists Devise A ‘P4P’ System For Efficient Internet Usage

A Yale research team has engineered a system with the potential for making the Internet work more efficiently, in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software providers can work cooperatively to deliver data.

The way people use the Internet has changed significantly over the past 10 years, making computers seem to run less efficiently and putting strain on the available bandwidth for transmitting data.

Since 1998, the percentage of Internet traffic devoted to the download and upload of large blocks of information using P2P software has increased from less than 10 percent to greater than 70 percent in many networks. By contrast, Web browsing now accounts for 20 percent and e-mail less than 5 percent of total Internet traffic, down from 60 and 10 percent respectively, in 1998.

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

Full article: sciencedaily.com