New Protocol To Boost BitTorrent Speeds
BitTorrent, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer networking start-up is working with Cachelogic of Cambridge, UK on a new protocol called the ?Cache Discovery Protocol? or CDP, which supposedly will act like DHCP for peer to peer networks.
DHCP assigns IP addresses to devices on a network automatically, without much mucking around on the end user part. Similarly, the new CDP would allows BitTorrent client to auto discover better seeds that have been cached on the network, and allow faster downloads of the files. The new technology is especially helpful in situations where there are only a handful of seed files. This is not the frist time BitTorrent and Cachelogic have teamed up. The two companies have a history of working together and did a large scale trial for UK-based broadband provider, ntl. Though, not all details are available at this point, my understanding is that the caching of these seeds addresses will address some of the issues around BitTorrent?s performance, especially where there is very limited upstream speed available.
