Recovering phosphorus from wastewater is an effective way to alleviate the crisis of phosphate resources.At present,the common phosphorus recovery process in wastewater treatment plants is mainly the sidestream process to recover phosphorus from excess sludge,which has a shortage of complicated processes and low recovery efficiency.The mainstream phosphorus recovery process with biofilm can realize simultaneous removal and enrichment of phosphorus.The process is simple and efficient,thus has more development prospects.Due to the significant differences in operating principle and mode,the regulation measures for the two processes are not the same.In this paper,the A2O process and biofilm sequencing batch reactor process were taken as the representative and the similarities and differences in the operating principles and modes of the sidestream and mainstream phosphorus recovery processes were compared,also,the influences of regulatory factors such as temperature,pH,hydraulic residence time,dissolved oxygen,carbon source and phosphorus storage capacity on the two processes were summarized based on the metabolic mechanism of phosphorus accumulating bacteria.The differential mechanism was expounded to provide a reference for the further development of the phosphorus recovery process of biofilm.