A study on key strategies in P2P file sharing systems and ISPs' P2P traffic management

The flourish of P2P systems draws a lot of attention of networking researchers. Some research efforts focus on P2P systems, trying to understand the mechanism of various implementations and the behavior pattern of P2P users, and then improve the systems’ performance. Others look at the issue from the angle of ISPs, trying to help ISPs solve various issues brought by P2P applications. In this article, we conduct a review study on recent research efforts in these two areas. The first part of this article focuses on several key strategies that have significant influence on the performance of P2P systems. In the second part, we review some important techniques for ISPs to manage P2P traffic, i.e., blocking, caching and localization, and compare their advantages and disadvantages.