Preferential Attachment Topology Formation of the P2P IPTV System

Since the appearance of various P2P IPTV systems which broadcast live video streaming to peers, they have attracted millions of users from all over the world. It is reported that the online audience have reached more than 1.2 million in peak time by the official website of PPStream, one of the most popular IPTV systems in China. However, at the same time the popularity of these systems make the amounts of traffic grow exponentially. In the paper we propose a generation model of topology formation for these systems. The policy-based partner selection is well adopted in the model. The simulation results reveal some vital characteristics of the topology. To validate the model, we developed our dedicated crawler of PPStream. Based on the datasets, we think generated topology can characterize metrics of the real system well, such as the rate variation and the sharing ratio.