Insight into the P2P-VoD System: Performance Modeling and Analysis

P2P-based video-on-demand (P2P-VoD) streaming service has recently emerged as a new paradigm of Internet application. Unlike streaming live content, P2P-VoD system require each user to contribute a small amount of storage since it has less synchrony in the users sharing video content. At the same time, new mechanisms for peer service scheduling are carefully designed. On briefly describing the architectural design based on the real system deployed by PPLive, we develop a stochastic model that seeks to expose the essential behavior of the PPLive P2P-VoD system. The performance evaluation followed shows that the system design of PPLive P2P-VoD system could guarantee good viewing quality, and sheds insight on the fundamental characteristics and limitations of the system quantitatively. Such theoretical analysis on P2P-VoD could help to improve the viewing quality and make such system more robust and scalable.