Paper Info
Title
P2P vs. IP multicast: Comparing approaches to IPTV streaming based on TV channel popularity
Abstract
Already a popular application in the Internet, IPTV is becoming, among the service providers, a preferred alternative to conventional broadcasting technologies. Since many of the existing deployments have been done within the safe harbor of telco-owned networks, IP multicast has been the desired streaming solution. However, previous studies showed that the popularity of the TV channels follows the Pareto principle, with the bulk of TV channels being watched only by a small fraction of viewers. Recognizing the potential scalability issues, we believe that multicast streaming approach may not be desirable for unpopular TV channels, especially when there are many such channels in the provider’s service package. For this reason, the peer-to-peer content distribution paradigm is seen as an alternative, in particular for non-popular content. In order to analyse its viability, in this paper we perform a comparative analysis between IP multicast and a peer-to-peer overlay using unicast connections as streaming approaches, in the context of channels with different degrees of popularity. The analysis targets the bandwidth utilization, video quality and scalability issues, and our findings show that while multicast is always more efficient, peer-to-peer has a comparable performance for unpopular channels with a low number of viewers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.comnet.2010.12.020
Computer Networks
Keywords
Field
DocType
IP multicast,Unicast,Peer-to-peer,IPTV,TV channel,Popularity
Broadcasting,Computer science,Computer network,Service provider,Multicast,Unicast,IPTV,Video quality,IP multicast,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
55
6
1389-1286
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.43
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alex Bikfalvi1384.01
Jaime García-Reinoso2527.51
Iván Vidal37212.30
Francisco Valera48016.05
A. Azcorra562281.98