Peer-to-Peer IPTV Service Impact on Network Traffic

Peer-to-Peer applications for real-time video and continuous media streaming, known as Peer-to-Peer IP Television, have become a common way to distribute contents via IP networks. This leads to a significant traffic increase produced by the fast expansion of these kinds of applications. The paper proposes a model and several scenarios to simulate a representative Peer-to-Peer IP Television mesh-pull like architecture in terms of functionality and users behaviour in open networks. Overlay and underlay networks simulations have been performed using Oversim and OMNet++ tools respectively. The results show an excess of bandwidth consumed by the dispersion of end users that is a critical problem because of unnecessary traffic burden in the network core.