IPTV over P2P streaming networks: The mesh-pull approach

IPTV, an emerging Internet application, would revolutionize the entertainment and media industries; however, IPTV also has the potential to overwhelm the Internet backbone and access networks with traffic. To date, IPTV over P2P streaming networks has advanced significantly using two different approaches: tree-push versus mesh-pull. In particular, the mesh-pull streaming approach has achieved a number of successful commercial deployments. In this article, we examine the current progress in the research and development of mesh-pull P2P streaming systems. We provide an overview of the general mesh-pull streaming architecture and review various challenges, design issues, and interesting research problems in this approach. We discuss the construction costs for providing an IPTV service with service guarantees. We outline a measurement technique for monitoring the video playback quality of mesh-pull streaming systems. We emphasize that the future P2P IPTV systems should be designed to meet the expectations of users for quality-of-experience. We also identify a few other important issues for IPTV over P2P streaming networks, including the traffic pressure on ISPs, various security concerns, and the necessity to re-examine the most appropriate P2P architecture. Insights obtained in this study will be valuable for the development and deployment of future P2P IPTV systems.