Experimental Comparison of Peer-to-Peer Streaming Overlays: An Application Perspective

Peer-to-Peer streaming systems are becoming highly popular for IP TeleVision (IPTV). Most systems can be categorized as either tree-based or mesh-based, and as either push-based or pull-based. However, there is a lack of clear understanding of how these different mechanisms perform comparatively in a real-world setting. In this paper, the authors compare two representative streaming systems using mesh-based and multiple tree-based overlay routing through deployments on the PlanetLab wide-area experimentation platform. To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to directly compare streaming overlay architectures in real Internet settings.