P2P News from IETF

As some people know the IETF is taking some actions w.r.t. the standardization of protocols related to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology within ALTO and P2PSIP groups. Recently, two new drafts have been submitted which might be interesting to some of you:

The first one is entitled An Architecture of ALTO for P2P Applications with the following abstract: ALTO enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and network application software distributors to work jointly and cooperatively to reduce network resource consumption and to improve application performance. In this document, we specify an architecture for integrating ALTO into peer-to-peer (P2P) applications.

The second one is related to P4P Protocol Specification: Provider Portal for Network Applications (P4P) is a framework that enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and network application software developers to work jointly and cooperatively to optimize application communications. The goals of this cooperation are to reduce network resource consumption and to accelerate applications. To achieve these goals, P4P allows ISPs to provide network information and guidance to network applications, allowing clients to exchange data more effectively. This document specifies the P4P protocol operations and message formats. The goal is provide a formal specification for developers to create inter-operable implementations.

Please note that latter is mainly driven by Yale University and is in competition with the so-called Oracle Service developed by an institute of the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, namely the research group of Anja Feldmann. I wonder whether they will start/join the "standardization war".