The characteristics of the Internet have changed dramatically in the past decade. Until recently, traffic has mainly been web (HTTP), consumed through browsers. Data had the following attributes:

• Centralized and located on backbone servers
• Asymmetric by nature, with users rarely uploading data
• User-side initiated with almost all data transfer occurring from user initiated sessions
• Somewhat compressible as HTML is a text based protocol

Reducing traffic used to be easy. HTTP caches stored recently accessed web pages and loaded them from the local disk instead of accessing them from across the web. Compression servers compressed web pages that were later decompressed by browsers.

However, the nature of data has changed dramatically in the past few years. The proliferation of rich media (audio and video) consumption and distribution as well as file sharing, means that today’s data now has a very different character:
 

• Data is no longer centralized: instead it is distributed from numerous sources (servers or home users)

• Traffic is no longer asymmetric: users upload data when they share files though P2P networks

• Sessions are not always initiated by the user: as more file sharing networks support a push-back mechanism where the downloader registers at a queue on a remote peer, and actual data transfer is initiated by the uploader

• Data is no longer compressible: the content is already compressed using media schemes (e.g. MP3, AVI)

• Larger file sizes: multimedia content requires very large files, sometimes reaching hundreds of MBytes of data.
  

This new nature of Internet traffic makes traditional bandwidth optimization solutions inadequate. IPortent addresses these new needs through its groundbreaking technology – Divination™.
 

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