P4P: Open standard for P2P

After the fourth generation of P2P and their need around the globe yields out the new standard for devliering network awareness to P2P networks. As in tradional P2P, peers communicate with each other without regard to network topology but now, P4P basically boosts up the P2P downloads by localizing the network.

There are several ways to make it work and one of them is to add two types of tracker;

• pTracker (Peer Tracker)
• iTracker (Internet Tracker).

First, peer queries the pTracker and it searches and returns the result regarding the right bytes in the local area otherwise pTracker could go to the iTracker for peering suggestions that take into account network topology and costs.

The list of active peers is then seen by peer with the help of pTracker. The pTracker is normally run by any P2P file sharing system like BitTorrent while iTracker can be run by P2P networks or ISPs.

There will hopefully be better performance for users and less network overhead
for the ISP.

Source: Zdnet Blogs