A growing concern among ISPs has been that 60% of their network bandwidth is used for the BitTorrent protocol. This has led to an increase in cost for the ISP due to growing network needs. To remedy this, ISPs have been forced to take action in a couple of ways. Early adopters used a bandwidth throttling technique which searched out the BitTorrent protocol and intentionally cut back the amount of available bandwidth issued to users in the BitTorrent community. Although this technique seemed to relenquish some of the burden for ISPs, paying customers were outraged and demanded action.
A more viable solution is the use of traffic caching. What this technique does is caches popular download paths in internal network servers, thereby making BitTorrent traffic route through internal networks, rather than rely on their external network usage. This allows speeds to remain constant and its much cheaper for ISPs to operate within their internal network.
BitTorrent 4.20 impliments the latter, a traffic caching feature called Cache Discovery Protocol. The feature within the client allows ISPs to detect that the client can understand how to route through cached servers and makes both parties happy.
Source:
Slyck
Written by: Dave Horvath @ 22 Jun 2006 16:29
