Surfing Peer-to-Peer IPTV: Distributed Channel Switching

It is now common for IPTV systems attracting millions of users to be based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. In such systems, each channel is typically associated with one P2P overlay network connecting the users. This significantly enhances the user experience by relieving the source from dealing with all connections. Yet, the joining process resulting in a peer to be integrated in channel overlay usually requires a significant amount of time. As a consequence, switching from one channel to another is far to be as fast as in IPTV solutions provided by telco operators. In this paper, we tackle the issue of efficient channel switching in P2P IPTV system. This is to the best of our knowledge the first study on this topic. First, we conducted and analyzed a set of measurements of one of the most popular P2P systems (PPlive). These measurements reveal that the set of contacts that a joining peer receives from the central server are of the utmost importance in the start-up process. On t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Erwan Le Merrer, Yaning Liu, Gwendal Simon
• Keywords: Channel Switching, Distributed And Parallel Computing, EUROPAR 2009, Iptv Systems, P2p Iptv Systems