Research database

In the next few years we will assist to the explosion of the market of high quality video distribution over Internet (IPTV). The massive deployment of IPTV platforms will offer the opportunity to change the paradigm of current TV broadcasting, moving from the nowadays mass TV, toward personalized TV, thanks to the creation of a large number of thematic channels.
IPTV services can be provided either exploiting IP multicast functionalities or relying on a pure end-to-end (P2P) approach. The first approach can be typically supplied only on a closed network infrastructure controlled by a single broadband operator. On the contrary, P2P approach has been successfully exploited to overcome these limits and potentially offer a scalable planetary infrastructure. On the other hand P2P-TV systems constitute also a fear for the current network carriers since the traffic they ingenerate may potentially grow without control, causing a strong degradation of quality of service perceived by Internet users or even the network collapse (and consequent failure of the P2P-TV service itself).
Starting from these considerations this project is aimed:
i)\tat providing a careful analysis of the impact that a large deployment of both general P2P-TV services may have on Internet, through an in deep characterization of traffic they generate;
ii)\tat providing suggestions for P2P-TV developers regarding the design of systems that minimize the impact on the underlying transport network while optimizing the user perceived quality
iii)\tat providing suggestions for Internet Providers by showing simple and minimum cost actions that can be taken to better exploit the network bandwidth in presence of P2P-TV traffic.
A software library containing many of the algorithms studied within the project will be made available to the community of P2P developers wishing to use them. At last network-aware P2P-TV application will be released, and its performance carefully evaluated.