Clubbing with the peers: A measurement study of BitTorrent live

Abstract

The peer-to-peer approach can greatly help to cope with highly dynamic live streaming workload by using idle client resources. Yet, P2P streaming typically comes at the cost of increased streaming delays caused by the inevitable multi-hop forwarding of content by peers within the overlay. Various P2P streaming approaches have been proposed aiming at a good tradeoff between flexibility, streaming delay, and costs in terms of traffic overhead for both content providers and clients. Recently, BitTorrent Inc. released a new P2P live streaming system termed BTLive, specifically targeted at low delay and low overhead. For content providers investigating the applicability of BTLive's approach, it is essential to understand its properties as well as its limitations. So far, no publicly available study exists that quantitatively analyzes BTLive's performance. To this end, this paper presents a measurement study of the official beta version of BTLive. The study aims to answer the following key questions: How peer-to-peer is BTLive? How delay optimized is BTLive? What is the overhead of BTLive? To answer these questions, traces of real BTLive traffic between a broadcast server and a number of peers deployed across Europe have been analyzed.