Session level analysis of P2P television traces

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed session-level analysis of P2P IPTV traffic from SopCast, revealing variability in traffic properties and offering insights into the application's network impact.

Contribution

It introduces a novel session-based traffic analysis approach for proprietary P2P IPTV protocols, enhancing understanding of their network behavior.

Findings

Traffic intensity varies across sessions

Packet size distributions differ per session

Burstiness and correlation properties are session-dependent

Abstract

In this study we examine statistical properties of traffic generated by the popular P2P IPTV application SopCast. The analysis aims at a better understanding of the mechanisms used by such applications and their impact on the network. Since the most popular P2P IPTV applications use proprietary unpublished protocols, we look directly at the generated traffic focusing on a single session analysis, which is the major contribution of our work. We present a basic characterisation of the traffic profile generated by SopCast during every separate session in terms of the intensity, the burstiness, the distribution of the packet sizes and the correlation. We show that some of these statistical properties of the analysed traffic may be quite different depending on the particular session.