ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy

penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."

Comments

Re:The problem is that it is stupid.

[snowraver1]

I have been using Ono for about 6 months now. When I installed it, it made very little difference at all. I usually get pretty good speeds though, with or without. I am still using the plugin now (with azureus) and am using it more because i'm too lazy to uninstall it, then for the speed increase (if any).

It sounded cool, but didn't work for me. I am curious if anyone else noticed similar findings, or if I am all alone.

Re:The problem is that it is stupid.

[CountZer0]

Except they aren't only looking at the physical location of the machines. They are basically merging both network and physical location to come up with a hybrid location mapping that provides the lowest latency route.

From the FAQ:
Does this really work? In a paper pending publication, we show that our lightweight approach significantly reduces cross-ISP traffic and over 33% of the time it selects peers along paths that are within a single autonomous system (AS). Further, we find that our system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates.