LIVE STREAMING USING PEER DIVISION MULTIPLEXING

A Number of commercial peer-to-peer (P2P) systems for live streaming have been introduced in recent years. The behaviour of the popular systems has been extensively studied in several measurement papers. However, these studies have to rely on a “black-box” approach, where packet traces are collected from a single or a limited number of measurement points, to infer various properties of the traffic on the control and data planes. Although, such studies are useful to compared different systems from the end user’s perspective. It is difficult to intuitively understand the observed properties without fully reverseengineering the underlying systems. In this paper, we describe the network architecture of Zattoo, one of the largest production, live streaming providers, in Europe, at the time of writing, and present a large-scale measurement study of zattoo, using data collected by the provider. To highlight we found that even, when the zattoo system was heavily loaded with as high as 20000 concurrent users on a single overlay, the median channel join delay remained less than 2-5 s, and that, for a majority of users, the streamed signal lags over-the-air broadcast signal by more than 3 s.