Network awareness in P2P-TV applications

Abstract. The increasing popularity of applications for video-streaming based on P2P paradigm (P2P-TV) is raising the interest of both broadcasters and network operators. The former see a promising technology to reduce the cost of streaming content over the Internet, while offering a world-wide service. The latter instead fear that the traffic offered by these applications can grow without control, affecting other services, and possibly causing network congestion and collapse. The “Network-Aware P2P-TV Application over Wise Networks” FP7 project aims at studying and developing a novel P2P-TV application offering the chance to broadcast high definition video to broadcasters and to carefully manage the traffic offered by peers to the network, therefore avoiding worries to Internet providers about network overload. In such context, we design a simulator to evaluate performance of different P2P-TV solutions, to compare them both considering end-users ’ and network providers ’ perspectives, such as quality of service perceived by subscribers and link utilization. In this paper, we provide some results that show how effective can be a network aware P2P-TV system.

Video-on-Demand over Internet: a survey of existing systems and solutions

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client/server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services, so there have been many proposals of systems, mostly based on a peer-to-peer or on a hybrid server/peer-to-peer solution, to solve this issue. This work presents a survey of the currently existing or proposed systems and solutions, based upon a subset of representative systems, and defines selection criteria allowing to classify these systems. These criteria are based on common questions such as, for example, is it video-on-demand or live streaming, is the architecture based on content delivery network, peer-to-peer or both, is the delivery overlay tree-based or mesh-based, is the system push-based or pull-based, single-stream or multi-streams, does it use data coding, and how do the clients choose their peers. Representative systems are briefly described to give a summarized overview of the proposed solutions, and four ones are analyzed in details. Finally, it is attempted to evaluate the most promising solutions for future experiments. Résumé La vidéo à la demande est un service où des films sont fournis à distance aux utilisateurs avec u