ENSC 427: COMMUNICATION NETWORKS The Effects of Network Awareness in P2P Protocols on Network and Protocol Performance

In recent years, P2P applications have become increasingly popular among the new generation of web-savvy users. Applications like Kazza and Bit torrent are being used more and more to exchange large amounts of data. With the increase in data transfer comes increased network congestion; in turn, this reveals that a fundamental weakness of the current generation of P2P: peer search algorithms. P2P protocols like Bit torrent search for data by locating a peer that is geographically close, or the fastest peer etc... These algorithms, on the other hand do not yet have any criteria for topological closeness of the destination peer and the geographically close peer is not necessarily the fewest number of router hops away. The ensuing congestion from P2P networks has led many ISPs to throttle P2P traffic to be able to provide higher quality of service (QoS) to regular web users at the expense of P2P users. Thus we propose implementing network awareness in the P2P protocol itself for a twofold benefit; the P2P downloads will be faster, and the QoS to regular web users will be maintained