Author
Jeff Seibert, David Zage, Sonia Fahmy, Cristina Nita-Rotaru
Abstract
Peer-to-peer streaming systems are becoming highly
popular for IP Television (IPTV). Most systems can be categorized
as either tree-based or mesh-based, and as either pushbased
or pull-based. However, there is a lack of clear understanding
of how these different mechanisms perform comparatively in
a real-world setting. In this paper, we compare two representative
streaming systems using mesh-based and multiple tree-based
overlay routing through deployments on the PlanetLab widearea
experimentation platform. To the best of our knowledge,
this is the first study to directly compare streaming overlay
architectures in real Internet settings. Our results indicate that
mesh-based systems inject a much higher number of duplicate
packets into the network, but they perform better under a variety
of conditions. In particular, mesh-based systems give consistently
higher application goodput when the number of overlay nodes,
or the streaming rates increase. They also perform better under
churn and large flash crowds. Their performance suffers when
latencies among peers are high, however. Overall, mesh-based
systems appear to be a better choice than multi-tree based
systems for peer-to-peer streaming at a large scale.
