Multi-layer quality assessment framework for P2PTV applications

The success of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks has led to its broad adoption on different scenarios, thereby increasing the set of features present on such protocols, e.g., audio and video-conferencing, streaming of multimedia content using Peer-to-Peer TeleVision (P2PTV), and so on. The wide acceptance of P2P multimedia streaming by the end-users has captured the attention of content providers, making it a suitable candidate to be adopted as technology for the offered multimedia services. Nevertheless, to deliver a proper service, content providers, need to quantify and assess the quality perceived by the users. In the past, this assessment was embedded into Service Level Agreements under the client/server paradigm, but with the introduction of P2P, these solutions became unsuitable. To overcome this limitation, we present a Monitoring and Management Framework to assess the Quality of Service and the Quality of Experience of multimedia traffic in any P2PTV streaming application. The proposed approach is designed to potentially assist management systems to actively assess the performance of existing streaming deployments. To demonstrate the usefulness of the system, we, as an use-case, deploy it in a real scenario where we analyze the performance of a particular streaming application in a P2PTV environment.