i know this one would be better of to the gdf but i dont bother to register with yahoo.
its also possible that something like this is already considered but the gdf is keeping their stuff closed so...
anyway, the current situation is that 80% of the traffic is queries. some gnutella clients can show the current bandwidth usage in kb. per node this is around 0.7kb/sec - 1.5kb/sec.
this number is misleading.
please take a look at
http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc791.txt
and
http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc793.txt
for a search request that has a 18 byte header and a 10byte search string you get around 40 bytes of overhead and thats not taking the lower level protocols into acount (PPP, TCP ACK`s..)
so i propose a new packet type that wraps several smaller query packets into one big packet.
packet example:
16 byte guid
1 byte function: some yet unused function
1 byte ttl: 0
1 byte hops: 0
4 byte payload: sum of sub packets size.
and then all the small query packets.
a modem user could handle a lot more queries when they are packed like this.