Multiplexing in the Peer-To-Peer Live Streaming

The behaviour of commercial peer-to-peer systems for live streaming has been extensively studied in several measurement papers. These studies have to rely on a "Blackbox" approach, where packet traces are collected from a single or a limited number of measurement points, to infer various properties of traffic on the control and data planes. It is difficult to intuitively understand the observed properties without fully reverse-engineering the underlying systems. In this paper, the authors describe the network architecture of Zattoo, one of the largest production live streaming providers in Europe at the time of writing, and present a large-scale measurement study of Zattoo using data collected by the provider.