Characterization of P2P IPTV Traffic: Scaling Analysis

P2P IPTV applications arise on the Internet and will be massively used in the future. It is expected that P2P IPTV will contribute to increase the overall Internet traffic. In this context, it is important to measure the impact of P2P IPTV on the networks and to characterize this traffic. During the 2006 FIFA World Cup, we performed an extensive measurement campaign. We measured network traffic generated by broadcasting soccer games by the most popular P2P IPTV applications, namely PPLive, PPStream, SOPCast and TVAnts. From the collected data, we characterized the P2P IPTV traffic structure at different time scales. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work, which presents a complete multiscale analysis of the P2P IPTV traffic. Our observations show that the network traffic has not the same scale behavior whether the applications use TCP or UDP. For all the applications, the download traffic is different from the upload traffic and the signaling traffic has an impact on the download traffic.