Performance of P2P Live Video Streaming Systems on a Controlled Test-bed

We evaluate and compare the performance of three P2P streaming systems that are capable of streaming live video on the Internet by testing them on a carefully controlled, traffic-shaped network test-bed. We first describe the construction of the test-bed based upon Internet measurements between geographically distributed hosts. Then, we present a methodology for evaluating these P2P video streaming systems by performing video quality and network usage analysis from the log information obtained via running these systems on the test-bed. Our methodology to assess P2P live video streaming systems comprises analyzing the objective quality of the received video, waiting time to receive the first data byte, and several network usage measures such as P2P protocol overhead, load on the server due to the inefficiencies of the P2P overlay, and measurements of the number of bytes exchanged between the peers. It is essential that every peer buffers packets for some time before playing out the video in order to ensure good quality. We report the time that the user has to wait before he can see the video playing. These measurements not only gauge the performance of currently available P2P streaming systems but also highlight desired improvements in current P2P video streaming systems.