BitTorrent and Cachelogic are working together to give you a better speed for torrents.

BitTorrent, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer networking start-up is working with Cachelogic of Cambridge, UK on a new protocol called the “Cache Discovery Protocol” or CDP, which supposedly will act like DHCP for peer to peer networks.

The protocol has been developed by Cachelogic. DHCP assigns IP addresses to devices on a network automatically, without much mucking around on the end user part. Similarly, the new CDP would allows BitTorrent client to auto discover better seeds that have been cached on the network, and allow faster downloads of the files. The new technology is especially helpful in situations where there are only a handful of seed files.

An advantageous solution which has grown in acceptance is traffic caching. A compromise between the ISP and customer, caching allows users to participate on BitTorrent without utilizing an ISP’s external bandwidth. Caching servers, which are hosted by the ISP, maintains the most popular and most queried traffic. Instead of the BitTorrent client utilizing the ISP’s external bandwidth to obtain the required file(s), traffic is contained between the cache server and the end user. In other words, the traffic is maintained within the ISPs internal network, which is considerably cheaper than handling external traffic.

The torrent swarms see performance degradation when there are too many leechers, folks who pull down more data than they upload. Many actually don’t do this intentionally. While the broadband providers have been slowly increasing the downstream speeds, the upstream data transfer speeds have not increased that quickly.

Internet service providers will find this new protocol particularly interesting. It will boost the speed of downloads, but will place limited demands on their system from an upstream data perspective.

“We spent an extraordinary amount of time face to face with the largest ISPs in the world who now see anywhere between a third and up to 70% of all their traffic in the BT protocol,” Ashwin Narvin, president of BitTorrent, Inc., told Slyck.com in May.

“We’re trying to convince them there’s a better way to manage the BitTorrent protocol then to limit it and to shape it. We’ve been strong advocates of the caching solution in the next version of the (Mainline) BitTorrent client, what we are calling the Allegro release. There’ll be a protocol which allows ISPs to cache BitTorrent content which is a great thing for users. It improves the user experience for downloading with BitTorrent no matter what client it is as long as it’s implemented the Cache Discovery Protocol and it also offers ISPs a cost effective way to allow BT to exist on their networks.”