“ P4P: A set of business practices and integrated network topology awareness models designed to optimize ISP network resources and enable P2P based content payload acceleration. ” -- DCIA P4PWG
What is P4P
P4P is a framework that can be used to enable Internet service providers (ISPs) and peer-to-peer (P2P) software distributors to work jointly and cooperatively.
The P4P framework can be used to ascertain appropriate and voluntary best practices to accelerate distribution of content and optimize utilization of ISP network resources in order to provide the best possible performance to end-user customers.
What does P4P do
P4P Targets to Solve the Bandwidth Challenge
P2P traffic is growing dramatically. Estimates [CacheLogic, 2006] are that up to 70% of ISP traffic is P2P.
Aside from the sheer volume of p2p traffic, which is swamping the infrastructure of many ISP's, the pattern of traffic poses a problem. Traditional CDN traffic is also high-volume, so it is expensive, but it is at least predictable, flowing from the CDN through the ISP infrastructure, down to consumers. Traditional P2P traffic, on the other hand, connects random peers, so while some p2p connections may be formed within an ISP, most P2P connections will be from the rest of the internet, at a high cost to the ISP. This results in reduced resources available to the ISP's other customers.
In response to this, ISP's have options of building out their infrastructure (expensive), or deploying various tactics to manage their bandwidth, in response to which the P2P networks take steps to conceal their networks from management tools, leading to an unproductive back-and-forth between the P2P networks and the ISP's.
We believes that P4P is more effective and enables cooperative approaches to address this challenge.
How P4P Solve the Bandwidth Challenge
P4P allows the P2P networks to optimize traffic within each ISP, which not only reduces the volume of data traversing the ISP's infrastructure, it creates a more manageable flow of data.
In our initial analysis, based on actual network maps provided by Telefonica and Verizon, the results have been quite promising, with clear benefits both to ISP's and P2P networks.
P4P Benefits
We have observed that both ISP and P2P can benefit from P4P, based on the results of our field tests on Verizon network.
See Here for a more complete summary of results.
ISP Benefits
ISPs would like to see a common Industry Solution that Creates a cooperative win-win solutions to an industry issue, and solves the problem before they have to cope with the problem. The availability of Carrier Grade P2P creates the Opportunity for new services.
Here is a summary of ISP benefits:
- P4P yields a dramatic drop in data delivery average hop count (from 5.5 to 0.89), which equates to lower cost to ISPs.
- Total external (peering) link load dropped by as much as 42% (outbound) and 35% (inbound).
- Normalized load on internal backbone links dropped by as much as 71% on average.
P4P yields a dramatic drop in data delivery average hop count, which equates to lower cost to ISPs.
P2P Network and User Benefits
P2P Applications benefit from faster downloads for users, and decreased incentives for ISPs to manage P2P traffic. End users benefit from a dramatic improvement in data delivery speed, which results in faster downloads for users.
Here is a brief summary of P2P benefits:
- The improvement of download rates for data transfers among FTTH clients was 205% on average.
- The improvement of download rates for FTTH clients downloading from all clients was 23%.