When is P2P Technology Benecial for IPTV Services?

This paper studies the conditions under which peer-to-peer (P2P) technology may be benecial in providing IPTV ser-vices over typical network architectures. It has two major contributions. First, we contrast two network models used to study the performance of such a system: a commonly used logical \Internet as a cloud " model and a \physical " model that re ects the characteristics of the underlying network. Speci cally, we show that the cloud model overlooks impor-tant architectural aspects of the network and may drastically overstate the benets of P2P technology by a factor of 3 or more. Second, we provide a cost-benet analysis of P2P video content delivery focusing on the prot trade-os for dierent pricing/incentive models rather than purely on ca-pacity maximization. In particular, we nd that under high volume of video demand, a P2P built-in incentive model per-forms better than any other model for both high-denition and standard-denition media, while the usage-based model generally generates more prots when the request rate is low. The at-reward model typically performs better than the usage-based model- especially when most requests are for high-denition media