Abstract

Peer-to-peer technologies have proved to be effective for various bandwidth intensive, large scale applications such as file-transfer. For many years, there has been tremendous interest in academic environments for live video streaming as another application of P2P. Recently, a number of new commercial scale video streaming systems have cropped up. These systems differ from others in the type of content that they provide and attract a large number of users from across the globe. These are proprietary systems and very little is known about their architecture and behavior. This study is one of the first of its kind to analyze the performance and characteristics of P2P live streaming applications. In particular, we analyze PPLive and SOPCast, two of the most popular systems in this class. In this paper, we (1) present a framework in which to analyze these P2P applications from a single observable point, (2) analyze control traffic to present a probable operation model and (3) present analysis of resource usage, locality and stability of data distribution. We conclude that P2P live streaming has an even greater impact on network bandwidth utilization and control than P2P file transfer applications.

Description

First, we separated the control traffic from the data traffic in the collected traces. This allowed us to analyze the control traffic separately and reverse engineer the protocols used to get an understanding of how these systems work. We present an overview of how these systems operate based on our analysis of the control traffic. Next, we define a generic framework that can be used to evaluate the data distribution performance of such systems. For that purpose, we define metrics to highlight the key characteristics of the distribution plane. Finally, we evaluate the two systems using the framework formulated and present results.

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