Oh No! Ono

How can you not like a program named after John Lennon's wife. No, not "Yoko" but "Ono." In truth, Ono wasn't named after Yoko, but instead from the Hawaiian word for "delicious." And what's delicious about Ono is the Internet bandwidth it saves.

The problem is this: Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services, which connect individual users for simultaneous uploads/downloads directly rather than through a central server, account for as much as 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide. That level of use has led ISPs to forcefully reduce P2P traffic. And being able to communicate with computers that are in close proximity to each other can save bandwidth and lighten the load, so to speak.

"Finding nearby computers for transferring data may seem like a simple thing to do," says Choffnes, "but the problem is that the Internet doesn't have a Google Map. Every computer may have an address, but it doesn't tell you whether the machine is close to you."

Which is where Ono comes in. Ono is a plug-in for a design to improve download speeds for your BitTorrent client by efficiently identifying nearby P2P clients. The freely available software, which was developed by Northwestern University's Fabian Bustamante and Ph.D. student David Choffnes, helps ISPs reduce costly cross-network traffic without sacrificing performance. In fact, when ISPs configure their networks properly, Ono significantly improves transfer speeds--by as much as 207 percent on average.

Ono is different from other software applications that address the conflict between ISPs and P2P traffic because it requires no cooperation or trust between ISPs and P2P users. Ono, which is written in Java and runs on Windows and Linux, is open source and does not demand the deployment of additional infrastructure.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:36 PM  Permalink