An Assessment of Self-Managed P2P Streaming

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) IPTV applications have increasingly been considered as a potential approach to online broadcasting. These overcome fundamental client-server issues and introduce new, self-management features that help improving performance. Recently, many applications such as PPlive, PPStream, Sopcast, and Joost have been deployed to deliver live and video on demand streaming via P2P. However, the P2P approach has also shown some points of failure and limitations. In this paper we analyze, assess and compare two popular live and video-on-demand P2P streaming applications, Sopcast and Joost. Our goal is not simply to underline similarities and differences from the architectural and functional point of view, but also to highlight their performance in terms of traffic behavior and network efficiency; thus our experiments have been conducted in different scenarios including a large-scale event (Euro 2008).