P2P-TV Service and User Characterization

P2P-TV systems will certainly contribute to revolution the broadcast TV paradigm allowing ubiquitous access to a practically unlimited number of channels, representing an important step forward in the direction of the Anything/Anyone/Anywhere/Anytime communication paradigm of future Internet applications. Since its deployment, P2P-TV has already attracted millions of users and it is expected that P2P-TV applications will grow exponentially in the near future, both in terms of the number and diversity of their clients. Analyzing the behavior of P2P-TV systems and users and characterizing the generated traffic are fundamental steps to understand and evaluate the potential impacts of these applications on the underlying transport network. By performing a set of intensive measurements, we were able to obtain a good insight on the mechanisms that govern data transfer on some of the most important P2P-TV applications (TVants, SOPCast and TVU Player) and understand the most important advances they have suffered in the latest years. Among other relevant findings, the analysis that was conducted showed that peer location does not seem to be exploited by anyone of the studied applications and P2P-TV is already a worldwide phenomenon: in only 12 days of experiments, using the three selected applications, it was possible to contact peers from 177 different countries all over the world, even including countries where the interest for English-spoken channels was not so likely.