ISP-friendly P2P live streaming: A roadmap to realization

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications generate large amounts of Internet network traffic. The wide-reaching connectivity of P2P systems is creating resource inefficiencies for network providers. Recent studies have demonstrated that localizing cross-ISP (Internet service provider) traffic can mitigate this challenge. However, bandwidth sensitivity and display quality requirements complicate the ISP-friendly design for live streaming systems. To this date, although some prior techniques focusing on live streaming systems exist, the correlation between traffic localization and streaming quality guarantee has not been well explored. Additionally, the proposed solutions are often not easy to apply in practice. In our presented work, we demonstrate that the cross-ISP traffic of P2P live streaming systems can be significantly reduced with little impact on the streaming quality. First, we analytically investigate and quantify the tradeoff between traffic localization and streaming quality guarantee, determining the lower bound of the inter-AS (autonomous system) streaming rate below which streaming quality cannot be preserved. Based on the analysis, we further propose a practical ISP-friendly solution, termed IFPS, which requires only minor changes to the peer selection mechanism and can easily be integrated into both new and existing systems. Additionally, the significant opportunity for localizing traffic is underscored by our collected traces from PPLive, which also enabled us to derive realistic parameters to guide our simulations. The experimental results demonstrate that IFPS reduces cross-ISP traffic from 81% up to 98% while keeping streaming quality virtually unaffected.