Peer-to-peer protocols

Peer-to-peer is the single most bandwidth-consuming application in many parts of today‘s Internet. It not only incurs rising communication costs, but also adversely affects the performance of important network applications such as Internet telephony, Web, e-mail and file transfer. The high volume and the often questionable nature of the exchanged content make P2P a good target for traffic shaping. Assigning P2P a lower priority and defining data rate limits increase the performance of mission-critical applications particularly during periods of high utilization.