Topology investigation of a large-scale P2P VoD overlay network based on active measurement

The proliferation of large-scale P2P VoD overlays has created the demands to characterize and to understand the emergent properties of P2P VoD applications. In this paper, we investigate the P2P VoD overlay network by active measurements with the help of the developed software, VoDCrawler. Different from other existing work, our study focuses on the topology of the overlay networks. From the study, we have revealed the major features of the P2P VoD overlay networks and have compared them with that in P2P file sharing and live streaming systems. The discoveries we have obtained could help to further understand the operation of the P2P VoD systems and favor the commercial developments of the P2P VoD applications.