In today's networks, the growth of peer-to-peer traffic (P2P) is causing a major problem for companies and organizations of all sizes. SmartShare Systems has a unique approach to this problem, which - unlike many other products - is 100% effective. P2P applications are a problem because they are very "greedy" for network resources. They use various techniques, such as opening very large numbers of concurrent sessions and masquerading as other applications, which result in them taking far more than their fair share of the available bandwidth in the network. Measurements by service providers show that 70% or more of total bandwidth can be taken by these applications, even though less than 5% of users are using them.

The common method for detecting P2P until now has been "Deep Packet Inspection" (DPI), i.e. inspecting the contents of users' data packets, looking for the data patterns which identify known P2P applications. DPI has several problems though:

• Examining every byte of user data requires a lot of computation. DPI devices either have low performance or are very expensive. Equipping a 10+ megabit internet connection with DPI is often prohibitively expensive.
• Detecting P2P applications requires up-to-date signatures of their data patterns. But these applications are constantly mutating as their developers try to avoid detection, making the maintenance of up-to-date signatures nearly impossible.
• Increasingly, P2P applications use encryption, making it impossible to detect them using DPI no matter how powerful the processor or how sophisticated the signatures and algorithms.
• P2P applications use as much bandwidth as they can get, so detecting most of them offers little or no benefit. Measurements in service provider networks have shown that eliminating 70% of P2P users has no benefit for normal users - the remaining 30% of P2P users simply increase their traffic and take over the bandwidth that was just released.

The simplest way to ensure fair network usage is to deploy a SmartShare product. They all provide User Load Balancing™ and with this all hosts will receive an equal share of the network bandwidth, regardless of how many sessions they have. A user who is watching a video at YouTube, and a neighbor who has a greedy P2P application, will receive exactly the same share of the network. This is much better than today's situation, where the P2P user will typically get 100 or more times the bandwidth of the other user. The SmartShare products do this without any configuration commands. No complex policy setting is needed, and no updating of signature files.

The graph below shows a SmartShare product with User Load Balancing™ enforcing fairness between P2P and normal users.

To summarize, all SmartShare Systems products are powerful tools to manage all types of peer-to-peer traffic as they ensure fairness between P2P and normal users.