IPTV-P2P clients at home

The investigation around the use of peer-to-peer in IPTV environments goes on. The debate about the best compromise between the cost reduction offered by the peer-to-peer (P2P) approach and the quality requirements by the mass market is still open. Though some successful protocols are already worldwide used, there are still issues and optimization problems to solve. The main contribution of this work has been the deployment on PlanetLab (Plab) of a large testbed in order to investigate the performance of [P2P client - streaming player] systems in static and dynamic overlays: the goal was to recreate a real IPTV-like heterogeneous scenario with home users enjoying the same stream and cooperating via P2P. IPTV needs bandwidth and computational resources that single peers often struggle to provide. We chose the SopCast client for our experiments, mainly because of its popularity and its flexibility. Although SopCast analysis was not our main research purpose, we are able to point out some of its characteristics by observing its behavior in large and dynamic overlay, with different churn patterns (i.e. zapping channel behaviors). ©2009 IEEE