On Large Scale Peer-To-Peer Video Streaming: Experiments and Empirical Studies

It is an attractive idea to spread real time media using peer-to-peer method, however nobody knows if this technology can really deliver real time media to large number of users in global scale. This paper presents an empirical study on CoolStreaming, a data-driven overlay network for live media streaming. The core operations in CoolStreaming are very simple: every node periodically exchanges data availability information with a set of partners, and retrieves unavailable data from one or more partners, or supplies available data to partners. We have extensively evaluated the performance of CoolStreaming over real Internet environment. Our experiments, involving more than 10,000 real users, demonstrate that CoolStreaming can achieve quite good streaming quality even under global scaled, formidable network conditions. Meanwhile, we present several interesting observations from these large-scale tests. Finally, we try to predict some directions to the future of p2p media streaming