Design and Deployment of a Peer-to-Peer Based IPTV System over Global Internet

IPTV is highly advocated in recent years. Today, the growth of the residential users makes it possible to broadcast live video content through global Internet to a great population of end users. In this paper, we mainly describe the design and deployment experiences of a peer-to-peer (P2P) based IPTV system called Gridmedia since P2P is universally recognized as a scalable and cost-effective means for group communication. In order to reduce the playback latency at end users as well as offer resilience to high churn rate in peer community, Gridmedia organizes end users into an unstructured overlay while proposes an efficient push-pull streaming mechanism to distribute video segments among partner nodes. To further verify the prototype, on one hand we conduct extensive experiments over PlanetLab to confirm the overlay architecture and streaming mechanism in Gridmedia can greatly reduce the average playback latency as compared to previous works; on the other hand the practical deployment of Gridmedia system over global Internet also demonstrated it could reliably support large number of users without need of network infrastructure. We also discuss, in a practical way, the issues when perfecting a prototype to a publicly released platform and system performance during live broadcasting CCTV Spring Festival Gala 2006.