Network awareness of P2P live streaming applications

Abstract

Early P2P-TV systems have already attracted millions of users, and many new commercial solutions are entering this market. Little information is however available about how these systems work. In this paper we present large scale sets of experiments to compare three of the most successful P2P-TV systems, namely PPLive, SopCast and TVAnts. Our goal is to assess what level of "network awareness" has been embedded in the applications, i.e., what parameters mainly drive the peer selection and data exchange. By using a general framework that can be extended to other systems and metrics, we show that all applications largely base their choices on the peer bandwidth, i.e., they prefer high-bandwidth users, which is rather intuitive. Moreover, TVAnts and PPLive exhibits also a preference to exchange data among peers in the same Autonomous System the peer belongs to. However, no evidence about preference versus peers in the same subnet or that are closer to the considered peer emerges. We believe that next-generation P2P live streaming applications definitively need to improve the level of network-awareness, so to better localize the traffic in the network and thus increase their network-friendliness as well.

A Hybrid Approach to Assess the Network Awareness of P2P-TV Applications

“…Finally, work also exists that attempts at comparing similarities and differences of the above systems as [10], which analyzes the traffic pattern generated by these applications from both a network as well as from a transport layer perspectives. Only very recently, work started to appear that focuses more closely on the study of P2P-TV network awareness [11][12][13]. Yet, although these works share some similarity in their aim with ours, as detailed in the following the adopted approaches are rather different.…”

“…Although a number of relevant works [3,4,7,[10][11][12][13] recently targeted the study of popular Internet P2P-TV applications, still the question remains whether such systems are aware of (and behave friendly with respect to) the underlying IP network, which is precisely the aim of this work. From a high level perspective, we can define two categories of metrics that pertain to network awareness: pathwise metrics (such as RTT delay, available bandwidth, packet loss, etc.)…”

“…Recently, live streaming P2P-TV systems attracted the attention of the research community: as a result, a number of relevant works exist that exploit measurement techniques to study the behavior of such systems [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

“…Yet, despite valuable research already investigated such commercial applications [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] still little information is available about their internal algorithms, which are proprietary and closed. Specifically, a major concern is that, unless such systems are considerate of the underlying network, the very same potentialities of P2P-TV may constitute a worry for network carriers, especially in the case of HD streaming.…”

Stratum based Approach for Securing Multimedia Content Transmission over Large Scale P2P

“…but also more recently such as video streaming applications (PPLive, PPStream, UUSee, SopCast, etc. [2] [3]). However, the P2P networks still suffer from bad reputation because of the large number of illegal contents that are distributed by those applications.…”