Improving P2P streaming methods for IPTV

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) IPTV applications have increasingly been considered as a potential approach to online broadcasting. These overcome fundamental client-server issues and introduce new, self-management features that help improving performance. Recently, many applications such as PPlive, PPStream, Sopcast and Joost have been deployed to deliver live and Video-on-Demand streaming via P2P. However, the P2P approach has also shown some points of failure and limitations. In this paper we analyze, assess and compare two popular Live and Video-on-Demand P2P streaming applications, Sopcast and Joost. Fundamental shortcomings of existing applications are then countered by our approach where we employ a cross-layered method aimed at improving network efficiency and quality of experience. We show how simple modifications to existing protocols have the potential to lead to significant benefits in terms of latency, jitter, throughput, packet loss, and PSNR.