Large-scale measurement experiments of P2P-TV systems insights on fairness and locality

P2P-TV is an emerging alternative to classical television broadcast systems. Leveraging possibilities o ered by the Internet, several companies o er P2P-TV services to their customers. The overwhelming majority of these systems however is of closed nature, o ering little insight on their tra c properties. For a better understanding of the P2P-TV landscape, we performed measurement experiments in France, Japan, Spain, and Romania, using di erent commercial applications. By using multiple measurement points in di erent locations of the world, our results can paint a global picture of the measured networks, inferring their main properties. More precisely, we focus on the level of collaboration between peers, their location and the e ect of the tra c on the networks. Our results show that there is no fairness between peers and that is an important issue for the scalability of P2P-TV systems. Moreover, hundreds of Autonomous Systems are involved in the P2P-TV tra c and it points out the lack of locality-aware mechanisms for these systems. The geographic location of peers testifies the wide spread of these applications in Asia and highlights their worldwide usage.