Evaluation of swarm video streaming

IPTV has been hailed as a “killer app” of the Internet for a long time, but it has yet to really make a major breakthrough, due to various technical and political reasons. The recent influx of community-driven video distribution has re-actualized the research into efficient distribution methods for streaming video. In this paper, we suggest a number of modifications and extensions to the BitTorrent distribution and replication system to make it suitable for use in providing a streaming video delivery service, and implement parts of these in a simulator. Also, we report on a simulation study as well as a large-scale real-world study of the extensions on PlanetLab. Results show that BitTorrent can be used as a bandwidth-efficient alternative to traditional IPTV solutions.