Study of the relationship between peer-to-peer systems and IP multicasting

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, which have recently attracted public attention, involve a number of directly connected "peers" exchanging various types of information among themselves. However, applications based on P2P systems generally generate a lot of traffic and require not only the resources of every peer (e.g., CPU, memory, and bandwidth) but also many network resources. We think the main problems of P2P systems can be solved using IP multicasting, which is becoming popular as an effective way to transfer streaming media over the network and can reduce network traffic and the load on a streaming server. In this article we propose applying IP multicasting to P2P systems. After mentioning that almost every application can be improved by our proposal, we discuss which routing protocol is suitable. Finally, we show that we can get good results even when part of the network does not support IP multicasting.