On the Quality of Experience of SopCast

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing has become immensely popular in the Internet. Recently, there has been a growing interest in academic and commercial environments for live streaming using P2P technology. A number of new P2P digital television (P2PTV) applications have emerged. Such P2PTV applications are developed with proprietary technologies and the quality of experience (QoE) provided by them is not well known. Therefore, investigating their mechanisms, analyzing their performance, and measuring their quality are important for researchers, operators and end users. In this paper, we present results from a measurement study of a P2PTV application called SopCast, using both objective and subjective measurement technologies. The results obtained in our study reveal important design issues of SopCast and the QoE that the end users perceive.