Network Awareness of P2P Live Streaming Applications: A Measurement Study

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, due to their closed and proprietary design. In this paper, we present large scale 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. We first define a general framework to quantify which network layer parameters leverage application choices, i.e., what parameters mainly drive the peer selection and data exchange. We then apply the methodology to a large dataset, collected during a number of experiments where we deployed about 40 peers in several European countries.From analysis of the dataset, we observe that TVAnts and PPLive exhibit a mild preference to exchange data among peers in the same autonomous system the peer belongs to, while this clustering effect is less intense in SopCast. However, no preference versus country, subnet or hop count is shown. Therefore, 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 delay-based aggregate rate control for P2P streaming systems

“…Given the small size of chunks, UDP is typically preferred by actual P2P-TV applications [5] to enforce serial chunk packet transmission and to avoid both unnecessary delay due to TCP retransmission and congestion control. Controlling the uplink bandwidth utilization is thus a key problem.…”

“…To transmit chunks, UDP is typically preferred by actual P2P-TV applications [5] to avoid both the burden of handling TCP connections and the unnecessary delay due to retransmissions and congestion control. However, this requires to handle the congestion control and, in particular, to limit the amount of content a peer transmits, being download rate limited by video-rate.…”

Black-box analysis of Internet P2P applications

“…Finally, concerning the two use-cases considered in this work, further relevant work can be identified [28][29][30][31][32]. Concerning the undesirable behavior of P2P applications, recent work includes for instance [28,29], whereas network-awareness issues have been studied in the context of P2P-TV by [30][31][32], either considering a single [30] or several [31,32] applications.…”

“…Concerning the undesirable behavior of P2P applications, recent work includes for instance [28,29], whereas network-awareness issues have been studied in the context of P2P-TV by [30][31][32], either considering a single [30] or several [31,32] applications.…”

A Secure and Stable Multicast Overlay Network with Load Balancing for Scalable IPTV Services

“…However, the above-mentioned proprietary P2P video-streaming systems still suffer the issues of long startup delays, significant video-switching delays, large peer playback lags, and security due to the peer heterogeneity and churn [5][6][7].…”