Henning Schulzrinne was at Illinois Institute of Technology VoIP event last week.  (It would have been great to have him in Boston, but alas.)

A few years ago at a SIP Summit I ran I thought I understood him to say that Peer 2 Peer had scaling problems, this conference I understood why.

First of all, as any good discussion he defined the term peer 2 peer and explained that a peer 2 peer system had to have these attributes.

• Each peer must act as both a client and a server
• Peers provide computational or storage resources for other peers
• Self-organizing and scalling

They also Include the ability to

• Traverse NATS,
• replicate the service and
• provide data storage.

He pointed out that P2P systems are not causing backbone congestion as has been widely publicized the backbone has stayed a steady 20% utilization for P2P systems. P2P systems are great for building new services that have little infrastructure cost and great flexibility.

He then looks at the issues of the cost of power and processing and determined that Client server is greener.  For security, the system is more vulnerable and for network management harder to troubleshoot.
Other issues being faced are the unfriendly nature of mobile environments and video streaming.

Henning’s most interesting comment was that P2P was probably going to take over some home and office based solutions.  I also got the sense that a P2P network management client could be a very interesting project.
It was a very interesting discussion. And I recommend tracking Henning and his student’s activities.