Integrating Smartphones in Spotify’s Peer-Assisted Music Streaming Service

Spotify is a large-scale peer-assisted music streaming service. Spotify’s P2P network serves 80% of music data to desktop clients. On the other hand, the rapidly growing number of mobile clients do not use P2P but instead stream all data from Spotify’s servers. We enable P2P on a Spotify mobile client and empirically evaluate the impact of P2P protocols (in particular low-bandwidth traffic between peers) on energy consumption, both on 3G and Wifi. On 3G, current P2P protocols are highly energy inefficient, but simple modifications bring consumption close to the clientserver configuration. On Wifi, the extra energy cost of enabling P2P is much lower. Finally, we propose a protocol modification to further integrate mobile devices in Spotify’s P2P network according to their capabilities (power source, access network). This allows us to break the artificial division between desktop and mobile platforms and dynamically adapt as resources become (un)available to the device.