Peer Networking Challeges > Peer Caching Solutions

Peer-To-Peer Networking Challenges
Curing the Dominant Plague

The explosive growth of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic on both public and enterprise networks around the globe has introduced new challenges for network service providers.  P2P traffic represents an increasingly dominant percentage of worldwide data network traffic, and traditional methods of network optimization, which are based on HTTP protocols, are not well suited or even applicable to the alternate protocols used for P2P traffic.  As networks become increasingly saturated with traffic that cannot be cached, operational expenses increase, and network performance plummets.

The Need to Manage Peer Networking Costs

Like the Internet itself, peer networks cross service provider boundaries. When a requested file is not on the service provider's network, access fees must be paid for retrieval of the file from another network. Popular files are requested far more frequently than unpopular files, and if these files are off-net, expenses grow quickly, as indicated in the diagram below.