What is PSP

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been widely applied in Internet application systems, especially in sharing large video files among multiple user communities. Although P2P technology has lots of advantages, it brings troubles to network operation sometimes. P2P applications may consume much network bandwidth. Furthermore, P2P application is always apt to use the network bandwidth as much as possible. Long-time congestion brings the network management great difficulty. On the other hand, lack of proper management of P2P network also causes problems related to copyright, privacy, and security. Due to the reasons mentioned above, both the ISPs and ICPs urgently desire to find an effective way to monitor and manage the P2P network. In this chapter, the authors will discuss the issues of P2P network management. The “Introduction” focuses on the current state of P2P network, describing the problem of lack of management. The next section analyzes the P2P network features in network management. The difference between P2P network and Internet in management will be also discussed. The section “P2P Traffic Identification” is the P2P management technology of traffic identification, based on which many traffic shaping solutions presented in the section, “Traffic Shaping.” The next section introduces another kind of widely used approach - P2P caching. The current ISP and PSP collaboration solutions will be discussed in the section “ISP PSP Collaboration,” including the well-known framework of P4P (Haiyong Xie, 2007), biased neighbor selection of BitTorrent (Ruchir Bindal, 2006), Oracle (V. Aggarwal, 2007), and Ono (David R. Choffnes, 2008). The second to last section presents a proposal named Federation Based Solution to P2P Network Management (Jilong Wang, 2007), including the models of structure, communication, function and system. The final section will be the conclusion.