Peering

In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network. The pure definition of peering is settlement-free, ""bill-and-keep,"" or ""sender keeps all,"" meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers.An agreement by two or more networks to peer is instantiated by a physical interconnection of the networks, an exchange of routing information through the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing protocol and, in one case out of every two hundred agreements, a formalized contractual document.Occasionally the word ""peering"" is used to describe situations where there is some settlement involved. In the face of such ambiguity, the phrase ""settlement-free peering"" is sometimes used to explicitly denote pure cost-free peering.