A case study of large scale P2P video multicast

The availability of several P2P video multicast systems has enabled scalable and cost-effective video multicast on the Internet. We present several characteristics of a large scale P2P video multicast system of over 120,000 users. Our findings highlight several network provisioning issues that accentuate the difference between P2P video multicast and traditional IP multicast from a quality-of-service perspective. Further, our results also indicate that P2P video multicast suffers from slow channel tune-in times, further differentiating the service quality of P2P video multicast and QoS-enabled IP multicast. In addition, we illustrate how commercial grade P2P video multicast may require additional bandwidth resources through bandwidth augmenting server-farms, a result that counters the common perception that commercial P2P video multicast is a completely free content distribution platform. Our analysis indicates that some peers are widely spread across the IP address space that spans dozens of countries, indicating that traffic localization algorithms that use IP prefix-matching may not be efficient.