Assessing the Impact of Signaling on the QoE of Push-Based P2P-TV Diffusion Algorithms

Internet video and peer-to-peer television (P2P-TV) are attracting more and more users: chances are that P2P-TV is going to be the next Internet killer application. In recent years, valuable effort has been devoted to the problems of chunk-scheduling and overlay management in P2P-TV systems. However, many interesting P2P-TV proposals have been evaluated in an idealistic environment: in this work, we instead study them by taking special care in defining realistic conditions for their evaluation. In particular we analyze the impact that signaling errors can have on a push-based P2P-TV overlay by means of simulation. Results are expressed in terms of both user-centric and system-centric indexes: our main finding is that push P2P-TV systems are deeply affected by even very rare signaling errors, which are often overlooked without justification.