Peering in Network: A Basic Guide

Tudip

22 April 2019

In today’s era, data is the biggest asset. The data gathering, data storage, and data exchange are the major concerns while handling it. Considering the data as future currency, the transaction of this is a crucial subject. Even though, the basic intention will always be to ensure the security, reliability, integrity, and availability while sharing it with other media. There are lots of ways to exchange data or traffic between two or more networks. Either it may be IP Transit, network peering and uncountable many.

Peering comes into the picture when the requirement is not only based on sharing this data but sharing it securely, in a reliable way. When peering comes to the role, there are so many qualitative measures that peering has to answer. For instance, why should I prefer peering over any other network transit technique? So, let’s explore the in-depth quest towards the most reliable and cost-effective way of network transit technique.

What is Peering?

Internet Peering can be termed as local routing optimization, a way to exchange some of your traffic with neither party incurring Internet Transit fees. This involves two networks coming together to exchange traffic with each other directly and for mutual benefits without the intervention of a third party.

There are various ways to set up the peering with another network. This setup can be created in one of the following ways:

Public Peering

• When we talk about Public peering, this peering is performed across a shared network called Internet Exchange Point (IX or IXP). Using an Internet Exchange, you can connect to many other peers using one or more physical connections. Internet Exchanges can charge a port and/or membership fee to keep the infrastructure intact.
• Public Peering is easy to administer.
• As the Public peering uses the port for peering, this makes the adding of a new peer trouble-free.

Private Peering

• Private peering interconnections makes up most of the traffic on the Internet, especially between the largest networks.
• Private peering is performed by creating a direct physical connection between two networks generally by using Fibre optic cable.
• Private peering is more secure and reliable as compared to Public peering due to this direct physical connection.

Benefits of Peering in Networking

When we need to deal with data exchange, there are many aspects that help us to choose the correct network transit technique. Benefits of Peering itself justifies its selection on the basis of following parameters:

1. Cost Efficiency: 

   Considering the media of the transmission as a point to point, the link between them is apparently local. This will significantly reduce the cost of the network overhead. This is how we achieve lower cost reliable transmission without bearing the extra cost for external intervention.

2. Performance Enhancement: 

   Basically, performance depends on two factors: Lesser response time and better fault tolerance. Now, when a connection is a peer to peer, there is no long waiting queue to access any service or data. Hence, this results in a quicker response. Furthermore, there is less network interference from other nodes or I/O. Hence, there are less chances of network latency or data disruption.

3. Better Bandwidth utilization: 

   Availability of dedicated media to connect two peers, the whole bandwidth is utilized for a particular service requirement. Mostly, the handshake model would be helpful to serve peer to peer requirements. Hence, the chances for bandwidth congestion are minimal.

4. Reliability: 

   To achieve reliability for any resource, we would like to consider the following aspects such as availability of resources, accessibility of resources, security, and integrity of resources. In network peering, these are the basic pillars to be constructed over.

Sharing is caring – Let’s peering

I’d like to capitalize this opportunity to take you all towards our next hop to know what can be shared by this reliable, integrated, cost-effective network transit technique.

1. Data: 

   As discussed earlier, data is the biggest asset. Sharing this asset to the right peer at the right time in an appropriate amount will be the most important requisites while choosing any network transit. Peer to Peer network technique allows us to gain this advantage while sharing data.

2. Services: 

   There are certainly many expensive services which are infeasible to deploy for each individual machine. Why not we share it among all the indigents. Peering achieve this goal gracefully.

3. Platform: 

   If we can share the services, why not increase our scope further and let’s share the platform. Platform sharing usually comprises a variety of OS level processes and kernel-based services shared among various peers.

4. Resources and I/O: 

   Last but not least, we can share resources and I/O among the peers to get the maximum performance and least idle time from all the available resources.

Conclusion

Accumulating this discussion in one line – If the point comes to share the currency of this era reliably with integrity and availability at a cost-effective way, Peering can be one potential winner among other techniques.