Resource trade-off in P2P streaming

P2P TV has emerged as a powerful alternative solution for multimedia streaming over the traditional client-server paradigm. It has proven to be a valid substitute for online applications which offer video-on-demand and real-time video. This is mainly due to the scalability and resiliency that P2P gives to these applications to be deployed smoothly. Recently, various P2P platforms such as Sopcast, Joost, Zattoo, and Babelgum have become widely popular tools for delivering both real time and video-on-demand services. However, these P2P TV approaches do experience some points of failure and have limitations. For instance, most P2P applications are designed to balance CPU load and memory but not network resources or vice versa. Through an experimental-based study, this paper unveils strengths (e.g. good resilience to end-to-end delay and jitter) and shortcomings (e.g. poor resource optimization and load balancing) of these tools and makes proposals for improving the P2P IPTV performance. Our findings are based on the analysis of traffic traces from P2P streaming applications at Zattoo, Joost, Sopcast and Babelgum.