Measurement Study on PPLive Based on Channel Popularity

In recent years, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming systems experienced tremendous growth and became one of the largest bandwidth consumer on Internet. PPLive, one of the most popular applications in this category, is serving millions of registered users with hundreds of Live TV channels and millions of other video clips. Compared to the standard file sharing systems, the streaming service shows unique characteristics with more stringent time constraints and requires much higher network bandwidth. It is extremely important to evaluate and analyze existing applications, investigate the merits and weaknesses in these systems for the future development. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study on PPLive. Both Live TV and Video-on-Demand (VoD) channels are evaluated. We record run-time network traffic on the client side, compare and analyze the characteristics of these channels based on their popularity. For both categories, we perceive that, in general, PPLive delivers satisfactory performance if enough concurrent peers are present in a particular channel. We also observe that VoD channels perform better than their counterparts in Live TV category in terms of data transmission, workload distribution, and signal traffic overhead. However, Live TV channels show better peer coordinations than VoD channels. Overall, our results reveal that although PPLive can provide excellent viewing experiences for popular channels, there are still challenges to fully support unpopular channels. New designs and algorithms are in urgent need, especially for unpopular Live TV channels.