By Jacqueline Emigh, BetaNews
Mar 17, 2008

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After achieving much faster than usual download and data delivery rates in a field trial with Verizon and Pando, the P4P Working Group is now looking at doing trials with other ISPs and P2P network providers, said Haiyong Xie, a Working Group member who is also a Ph.D. student at Yale.

The trial made use of Xie's implementation of P4P networking principals, Pando's application plattform, and network topology data from Verizon.

Essentially, P4P is designed to speed up P2P downloads by localizing network traffic and reducing the numbers of routers and transfers needed for distributing data. Among the other statistics released here Friday, the Working Group said it could decrease the average number of hops needed in ISP internal data delivery from 5.5 to 0.89.

"Before doing this field trial, we'd conducted simulations. But results of the trial prove that P4P also works in the real world," said Laird Popkings of Pando Networks, co-chair of the P4P Working Group, speaking with BetaNews at the event in Manhattan.

A similar field trial is still under way with Pando -- a company which partners with NBC Direct, for example, on P2P content delivery -- and Spanish-based ISP Telefonica. Results from the Telefonica trial are expected over the next week or two.

Update (3:30 pm EDT March 17, 2008)

P4P can benefit content providers, too, according to Popkin. The costs of delivering content across multiple hops can run high, especially for video, he said.

"But different P2P networks have different properties, as do different ISPs," said Xie. "We're also interested in seeing how the P4P technology works with other P2P networks and with other ISPs."

When asked by BetaNews for some examples of other P2P networks the group might target, Xie mentioned BitTorrent and Sold State Networks as some possibilities.

The P4P Working Group has evolved from the New York P2P 2.0 Meetup, first held in June of 2007.

At that meeting, Xie first presented his research on the benefits of "Proactive Provider Assistance for P2P."

NBC Direct is delivering TV programs such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno over the Internet via P2P.
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