A Measurement Study of a Large-Scale P2P IPTV System

An emerging Internet application, IPTV, has the potential to flood Internet access and backbone ISPs with massive amounts of new traffic. Although many architectures are possible for IPTV video distribution, several mesh-pull P2P architectures have been successfully deployed on the Internet. In order to gain insights into mesh-pull P2P IPTV systems and the traffic loads they place on ISPs, the authors have undertaken an in-depth measurement study of one of the most popular IPTV systems, namely, PPLive. They have developed a dedicated PPLive crawler, which enables us to study the global characteristics of the mesh-pull PPLive system.