Insights into PPLive: A measurement study of a large-scale P2P IPTV system

With over 100,000 simultaneous users (typically), PPLive is the most popular IPTV application today. PPLive uses a peer-to-peer design, in which peers download and redistribute live television content from and to other peers. Although PPLive is paving the way for an important new class of bandwidth intensive applica-tions, little is known about it due to the proprietary nature of its protocol. In this paper we undertake a preliminary measurement study of PPLive, reporting results from passive packet sniffing of residential and campus peers. We report results for streaming per-formance, workload characteristics, and overlay properties