Characterizing Dynamic Properties of the SopCast Overlay Network

Peer-to-Peer live video streaming systems are becoming increasingly popular. Nevertheless, in spite of various studies of client behavior aspects and system optimizations, the current knowledge about the dynamic properties of the system, particularly how the P2P overlay network changes over time during a live transmission, is still superficial. In this paper, we provide a characterization of the dynamic properties of a popular P2P live streaming media application, namely Sop Cast. We use complex network metrics to analyze how the structure of the network evolves over time from the perspective of individual nodes (local view) and of the whole network (global view). We find that Sop Cast peers may be clustered into three profiles based on their centrality properties in the network. Moreover, in spite of peers changing their partners over time, they tend to remain with the same centrality profile. Also, the global network structure tends to remain roughly stable over time, except for a decaying clustering coefficient. Our findings can be used to generate more realistic synthetic P2P workloads and to drive future system designs and simulations.