An Empirical Study of the Coolstreaming+ System

In recent years, there has been significant interest in adopting the Peer-To-Peer (P2P) technology for Internet live video streaming. There are primarily two reasons behind this development: the elimination of infrastructure support and the self-scaling property of P2P systems. The success of the system Coolstreaming represented one of the earliest large-scale P2P video streaming experiments. Since then, there have been several large-scale commercial deployments. With desirable content, these systems have the potential to scale orders of magnitude beyond the existing academic P2P prototypes. However, to transform this potential into reality, the authors need to understand the key design trade-offs and principles, as well as the design limitations of these systems.