Yale researchers are leading the way on a system designed to enable ISPs to better handle the crush of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic increasingly gobbling up network bandwidth. Their P4P scheme will be the subject of a paper to be presented this summer at ACM SIGCOMM 2008 in Seattle.

In a nutshell, the "provider portal for P2P applications" makes P2P apps more aware of the networks they use, so that they can avoid congested pipes, and enables ISPs to better coordinate to handle traffic in the least expensive way. The work is being done through a working group of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) . 

We interviewed one of the Yale researchers, Haiyong Xie, back in March about the P4P effort. Read our Q&A here . Verizon has tested the system already.

CREDIT:  Doug Pasko (Verizon) and Laird Popkin (Pando)