On the Scalability of P2P-Based Push-Driven Live Streaming Systems

Television transmitted over IP (IPTV) presents numerous opportunities for users as well as service providers, and has attracted significant interest from business and research communities in recent years. Among the emerging IPTV delivery architectures, the peer-to-peer based delivery mechanism is considered attractive due to the relative ease of service deployment. However, the question of how well P2PTV applications would support a growing number of users has not been fully investigated so far. In this paper, we try to address this question by studying scalability and efficiency factors in a typical P2P based live streaming network. Through the use of the data provided by a production P2PTV system, we carry out simulations whose results show that there are still hurdles to overcome before P2P based live streaming could become widely used.