Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming: Insights and New Developments

Internet media content delivery started to emerge roughly a decade ago, and it has subsequently had a major impact on network traffic and usage. Although traditional client-server systems were used initially for delivering media content, researchers and practitioners soon realized that peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, due to their self-scaling properties, had the potential to improve scalability compared with traditional client-server architectures. Consequently, various P2P media streaming systems have been deployed successfully, and corresponding theoretical investigations have been performed on such systems. The rapid developments in this field raise the need for up-to-date literature surveys to summarize them. In recent years, numerous technological discoveries have been achieved. The focus of this report is to survey and discuss these new findings, which include new technological developments, as well as new understandings of these developments and of the existing P2P streaming techniques, through both novel modeling methodologies and measurement-based studies.