SILVERSTON Thomas

PhD graduated
Team : NPA
Departure date : 11/01/2009
https://lip6.fr/Thomas.Silverston

Supervision : Serge FDIDA

Co-supervision : FOURMAUX Olivier

Peer-to-Peer Video Live Streaming: Measurement Experiments and Traffic Analysis

The Internet is currently experiencing one of the most important challenges in terms of content distribution since its first uses as a medium for content delivery: users from passive downloaders and browsers are moving towards content producers and publishers. Following this change, the content delivery architecture of the Internet is also evolving from the classical client/server model to the peer-to-peer model (P2P). For new content delivery services that target a large number of receivers on the Internet, there are scalability issues to deliver the content to potentially millions of users at the same time. This is clearly the case for television service on the Internet. The television broadcast service with a peer-to-peer architecture (P2P-TV) has became an important research topic since it is expected that P2P-TV applications will become massively used on the Internet. There has been a lot of P2P-TV architecture proposals but, none of these proposals has been really implemented or deployed. At the same time, many commercial applications appeared on the Internet (PPLive, SOPCast) and their popularity is increasing. Even tough these applications are freely available, their source code is not open and their exact implementation details and protocols are still widely unknown. There is a lack of knowledge with these applications, with regards to their architectures, mechanisms or traffic. In this thesis, in order to fill the gap between the architecture proposals and the commercial applications, we study the P2P-TV applications by performing extensive measurement experiments. We passively measured the network traffic generated by popular P2P-TV applications. We present a detailed study of the P2P-TV traffic, providing useful insights on both transport and packet-level properties as well as on the behavior of the peers inside the network. The knowledge gained thanks to this traffic measurement and analysis is useful for several tasks as traffic identification, understanding the performance of different P2P-TV technologies, the impact of such traffic on the network and building more realistic models for simulations.In order to extend the scope of our study, we performed another measurement campaign at larger scale between Japan and France to better characterize the P2P network. From these experiments, we study the global organization of peers in the network, the amount of traffic they exchange and the overall collaboration of peers. We will also focus on the distance between peers and the geographic location of the users.

Defence : 09/16/2009 - 11h

Jury members :

M. Laurent MASSOULIÉ, Researcher at Thomson Technology Paris Laboratory (Rapporteur)
M. Thierry TURLETTI, Researcher at INRIA Sophia Antipolis (Rapporteur)
M. Kenjiro CHO, Researcher at IIJ Research Laboratory
M. Pierre SENS, Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6
M. Ioannis STAVRAKAKIS, Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
M. Serge FDIDA, Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6
M. Olivier FOURMAUX, Associate Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6

2006-2023 Publications