Measurement study on P2P streaming systems

Originally used as the default infrastructure for efficient file sharing, peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture achieved great successes. Now, the P2P model has been adopted for many other distributed applications, such as instant message and phone services, Internet gaming, and large-scale scientific computing. In recent years, P2P streaming systems experienced tremendous growth and became one of the largest bandwidth consumers on the Internet. Compared to standard file sharing systems, the streaming services show unique characteristics with more stringent time constraints and require much higher network bandwidth. It is extremely important to evaluate and analyze existing applications, and investigate the merits and weaknesses in these systems for future development. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study on two of the most popular P2P streaming systems, namely, PPLive and PPStream. They are very popular P2P streaming applications, and serving millions of registered users with hundreds of live TV channels and millions of other video clips. In our measurement, we deploy our collectors in China, and both live TV and video-on-demand (VoD) channels are evaluated. We record run-time network traffic on the client side, compare and analyze the characteristics of these channels based on their popularity. For both categories, we perceive that, in general, the two measured P2P streaming systems provide satisfactory experience to the audiences for all channels regardless of popularity. However, the most of data are downloaded from the dedicated servers for unpopular channels. We also observe that live TV channels show better peer coordination than VoD channels. Beside the traffic, we have also collected cache replacement information for VoD channels, and these measurement results can help us understand the caching mechanism of P2P streaming systems. With the support of the cache, VoD channels perform better than their counterparts in the live TV category in terms of data transmission, workload distribution, and signal traffic overhead. Overall, our results reveal that although P2P streaming systems can usually provide excellent viewing experience for popular channels, there are still challenges to fully support unpopular channels. New designs and algorithms are in urgent need, especially for unpopular live TV channels.