The Internet can develop so far, the fundamental reason is that each of its technological ideas are for the communication between people. The only thing that can shake the Internet now is a change in communication. With Internet technology all around us, only a few people know the concept of P2P. Even if you don’t understand, but you must be very familiar with the application of P2P technology, when you chat with QQ friends online, when you use Skype video chat with your friends, when you and wechat friends voice and video, in fact, you enjoy the pleasure of P2P technology to us. So what is P2P?
history
P2P is Peer to Peer. In Chinese, the word “Peer” means “Peer”, “colleague” and “partner”. But P2P is what they call peer-to-peer.
The development history of P2P networks is as follows:
- In 1979, Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis developed USENET, a peer-to-peer (P2P) news aggregation network
- In 1984, American Tom Jennings founded FideNet, a BBS network based on P2P technology
- In July 1997, Hotline Communication Limit (HCL) was established in Toronto, Canada. And developed software that allows its users to download things from other people’s computers.
- In 1998, Sean Fanning, 18, a freshman at Boston University, wrote a program for his roommate “how to find music on the Internet.” He wrote a simple program that collects music files and provides retrieval, putting all music addresses into a single server. Napster, which at its peak had 80 million users, demonstrated the feasibility of PEER-to-peer technology on a wide area network (WAN) scale.
- …
now
P2P technology is still widely used in today’s life.
As an IP phone system based on P2P network, Skype provides better voice effect over IP phones directly connected to the Internet, so it is widely welcomed by users. Since its launch in 2013, more than 21 million users have registered and more than 2 million people are online by 2015. The number of simultaneous online users reached 30 million in 2017. When users need to use Skype to communicate, Skype finds a P2P network channel with the largest current bandwidth in the P2P network and transmits data through multi-hop forwarding. Generally, the forwarding path found in P2P networks is of better quality than the direct path between two points of a call, so the voice is clearer and smoother during the call. Due to the emergence and rapid development of Skype, more and more users turn to IP phone, which has posed a certain threat to the traditional telecommunications industry. In the future, P2P BASED IP phone system like Skype is likely to replace the traditional telephone service to a large extent and become one of the daily communication methods.
In addition to Skype, wechat, QQ, Telegram, Thunderbolt, Cool Dog music and other applications have used P2P technology as the basis of text communication, video communication or file transfer.
Skype has been a huge success but because it uses proprietary protocols and is not open source, it doesn’t really add much to the Web ecosystem. In 2011, Google open source WebRTC, opened a new round of P2P communication climax.
WebRTC is an open source real-time communication engine framework developed by Google. Compared with other real-time communication frameworks, WebRTC can embed real-time video and audio in the browser without installing plug-ins. Great convenience for Web developers.
WebRTC communication supports P2P communication over other communication modes. P2P communication has the following advantages:
- Save communication cost: THE traffic and bandwidth of P2P communication are completed by the devices at both ends without passing through the central server. For the development of real-time video manufacturers to save traffic and bandwidth costs.
- High cost performance: P2P communication does not require a central server. For large-scale enterprises, it can greatly save the cost of buying a large server.
- Privacy protection. WebRTC’s P2P communication is based on HTTPS to ensure data security during transmission. Data does not pass through the server, leaving no data on the server. The risk of data being eavesdropped and leaked is greatly reduced. Telegram is terrorists as each other communication instant messaging tools, enough to see P2P network protection of privacy.
In the future
P2P communication is a very important way of communication in the future. P2P communication represented by WebRTC will have a profound impact on our daily communication.
China’s 5G network will be put into commercial use in 2020, which will significantly improve the condition of mobile networks and the quality of P2P communication. This is the boom time for P2P communication applications. There are numerous real-time communication cloud PaaS manufacturers based on WebRTC in China. Sonnet, Dingo and other manufacturers have created a mature WebRTC communication cloud platform, among which Dingo communication cloud is the first P2P communication free manufacturer in China. The demand for real-time video is high. Social networking, online education, finance, customer service and so on all need real-time video to provide users with better real-time interaction services. The performance of hardware devices such as smart phones and computers keeps improving, which provides a good hardware foundation for P2P communication. The update and adaptation of WebRTC by Google, Apple and other big companies accelerates the popularity of WebRTC and promotes the popularity of P2P communication in a disguised way.
What do you want to say about P2P communication? Feel free to leave a comment below.