Experimental comparison of peer-to-peer streaming overlays: An application perspective

—Peer-to-peer streaming systems are becoming highly popular for IP Television (IPTV). Most systems can be categorized as either tree-based or mesh-based, and as either pushbased or pull-based. However, there is a lack of clear understanding of how these different mechanisms perform comparatively in a real-world setting. In this paper, we compare two representative streaming systems using mesh-based and multiple tree-based overlay routing through deployments on the PlanetLab widearea experimentation platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to directly compare streaming overlay architectures in real Internet settings. Our results indicate that mesh-based systems inject a much higher number of duplicate packets into the network, but they perform better under a variety of conditions. In particular, mesh-based systems give consistently higher application goodput when the number of overlay nodes, or the streaming rates increase. They also perform better under churn ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LCN
• Authors: Jeff Seibert, David Zage, Sonia Fahmy, Cristina Nita-Rotaru
• Keywords: Computer Networks, LCN 2008, Mesh-based Systems, Representative Streaming Systems, —Peer-to-peer Streaming Systems