Network Awareness in P2P-TV Applications

Abstract

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.