| abstract
| - P4P, or Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, is a method for internet service providers (ISPs) and peer-to-peer (P2P) software to optimize peer-to-peer connections. P4P is being touted as a method that can save an ISP significant costs - the current P2P model may have a peer sending data across the world while a nearby peer is receiving data from across the world - when theoretically they could be transmitting the data locally. Beyond saving an ISP money, P4P proponents argue that using local connections also speeds up download times for P2P downloaders by between 2 and 4 times. The P4P working group has participants from the ISP, Movie/Content, & P2P industries.[1] It is focused on helping ISPs handle the demands of large media files and enabling legal distribution - they are building what they believe will be a more effective model of transmitting movies and other large files to customers. The working group is not endorsing or opposing the illegal download of copyright material, commonly associated with P2P networks. P4P works by having an ISP use an "iTracker" which provides information on how its network is configured. P2P software can query the iTracker and identify preferred data routes and connections to avoid, changing depending on the time of day. The P2P software can then co-operatively connect to peers which are closer (or cheaper for the ISP), selectively favoring peers instead of choosing peers randomly. Beyond providing the P2P client with their ISP's network information, there are 2 more types of interaction provided by an iTracker to help a client find local peers. This provides 3 choices: 1.
* the P2P client receives network information from the ISP's iTracker without revealing what file is being downloaded. It separately receives a list of peers from the torrent's tracker as usual. Note that for torrents with thousands of peers, only a shorter list of peers is sent and is unlikely to list all of the local peers. 2.
* the torrent's tracker can receive network information from the ISP's P4P iTracker, and use this to provide a more complete list of local peers to the P2P client 3.
* the P2P client can tell the P4P iTracker what file is being downloaded, so the iTracker can provide the P2P client with a list of local peers There is some concern by the P2P industry that P4P will slow down transfers for some users. Bittorrent, the most common P2P system, is designed to favor the fastest peers available - if that is changed to favor the closest peers instead then it must affect the speed. A user's speeds would increase when an ISP's "backbone" connections to other internet providers is a bottleneck (thus local peers would be faster) and for ISPs with high speed uploads (since uploads would be directed locally), but the equality and balance of peers would be lost. In particular, customers on networks with a good "backbone" to other internet providers but slow customer upload speeds would see their download speed drop.
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