Realistic media streaming over BitTorrent

While BitTorrent was originally conceived as a Peer-to-Peer file exchange protocol, it has proved extremely successful for asynchronous content distribution, allowing content sources to support huge numbers of users with a modest amount of bandwidth. This has prompted many researchers to study the possibility of using BitTorrent to support real-time media streaming. In this paper we present a comparison of three proposed adaptations to BitTorrent for media streaming, using our detailed packet-level BitTorrent simulator. Unlike previous evaluations which assumed that the streaming media player would drop data that did not arrive on time, in this paper we use a more realistic model where the player stalls when data are not available, thus placing emphasis on delays rather than losses. Our experiments indicate that under this, more realistic, evaluation model, user level performance can be quite reasonable.