Characterizing PPStream across Internet

Since the appearance of various P2P IPTV systems which timely broadcast live streaming to peers, they have attracted millions of users from all over the world. It is reported that the online audience have reached more than 1.2 million in peak time by the official website of PPStream, one of the most popular IPTV system in China. However, at the same time the popularity of these systems make the amounts of video traffic grow exponentially. In order to study the global playback performance, users ´ behaviors and network characteristics as well, we developed our dedicated crawler of PPStream. Based on the measurements, we make some extensive performance evaluation on this commercially successful P2P IPTV system, and some characteristics on geographic clustering, connection stability, arrival/departure pattern, playback quality, sharing ratio and topology have been revealed. We think these findings can help other researchers model such streaming systems and system operators make further optimizations.