Network Awareness of P2P Live Streaming Applications

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 wel

Taxonomy of P2P Applications

Peer-to-peer (p2p) networks have gained immense popularity in recent years and the number of services they provide continuously rises. Where p2p-networks were formerly known as file-sharing networks, p2p is now also used for services like VoIP and IPTV. With so many different p2p applications and services the need for a taxonomy framework rises. This paper describes the available p2p applications grouped by the services they provide. A taxonomy framework is proposed to classify old and recent p2p applications based on their characteristics

A framework for P2P application development

Although Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has become increasingly popular over recent years, there still exist only a very small number of application domains that have exploited it on a large scale. This can be attributed to a number of reasons including the rapid evolution of P2P technologies, coupled with their often-complex nature. This paper describes an implemented abstraction framework that seeks to aid developers in building P2P applications. A selection of example P2P applications that have been developed using this framework are also presented