P2P live scalable video streaming with ALTO service

Abstract

It has been measured that, as high as 80% of the average Internet traffic is now from peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, and upwards of 90% during peak hours. These results tell us that a significant portion of the traffic that ISPs route is P2P traffic. However, since the typical P2P application overlay network model is network-oblivious, due to its nature, it causes inefficient network utilization, and low quality of experience, from the perspective of the network providers and the end users, respectively. This inefficient resource utilization increases inter-ISP traffic, and leads to serious disruptions on ISP economics as well as lower QoE by the users. A significant portion of the P2P traffic on the Internet is for video applications. Furthermore, real networks are heterogeneous in link rates. Thus a live video streaming service should support streams with different qualities for users using different data rates. A possible solution to this problem is achieved by creating a different video file for each quality level. However, this solution is inefficient due to data duplication. To improve ISP economics, improve network efficiency and achieve acceptable QoE performance, we implement a P2P Live Scalable Video Streaming Mechanism and Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) Server, by using different peer ranking algorithms in this thesis. The main objective of this thesis, to show that the ALTO protocol reduces the inter-ISP traffic significantly while maintaining the application performance. Results reveal that, placing an ALTO Server decreases the inter-ISP traffic dramatically while maintaining a satisfactory QoE performance for the streaming video application.