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Researchers at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science have discovered a way to ease P2P traffic which accounts for nearly 70% internet traffic world wide. Ono, a unique software solution that allows users to efficiently identify nearby P2P clients.

A peer to peer (or “P2P”) computer network uses diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a service or application.

Because of high P2P usage tensions have been growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers’ P2P softwares and has driven them to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers.

The software named “Ono”, which is freely available and has been downloaded by more than 150,000 users, benefits ISPs by reducing costly cross-network traffic without sacrificing performance for the user.

Developed by Fabián E. Bustamante, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Ph.D. student David Choffnes, has been deployed for the Azureus BitTorrent P2P file-sharing client.

It reduces traffic by finding clients which are near by.

Choffnes said:

Finding nearby computers for transferring data may seem like a simple thing to do but the problem is that the Internet doesn’t have a Google Map. Every computer may have an address, but it doesn’t tell you whether the machine is close to you.

Worse yet, the simplest solution to finding computers that are close to you requires measuring the distance to every single one – an operation that is too costly and time consuming to be practical.

Instead, Ono relies on a clever trick based on observations of Internet companies like Akamai. Akamai is a content-distribution network (CDN), which offloads data traffic from Web sites onto their proprietary network of more than 10,000 servers worldwide. CDNs such as Akamai and Limelight power some of the most popular Web sites worldwide and enable higher performance for Web clients by sending them to one of those servers within close proximity.

Using the key assumption that two computers sent to the same CDN server are likely close to each other, Ono allows P2P users to quickly identify nearby users.

When ISPs configured their networks properly, this software significantly improved transfer speeds – by as much as 207 percent on average.

According to Bustamante:

The more users we have, the better the system works, so we’re just trying make it easy to spread.

The software can be downloaded from here.