The New York Times wrote a story last week about an alarm about the amount of data flowing through the Internet. It has been observed that the bandwidth is taking a major hit these days… there’s just too much data being passed to and fro. While the story focused on the video such as YouTube, it’s also true that the P2P traffic – much as ISPs may hate to admit it – makes up a very significant percentage of network traffic.
The P4P protocol aims to reduce all the traffic by using network topology data to select peers intelligently, instead of a random, thus increasingly routing efficiency. It is obvious: the more routers or hops traffic has to take, the less efficient it becomes.