Characterization of P2P IPTV Traffic: Scaling Analysis

P2P IPTV applications arise on the Internet and will be massively used in the future. It is expected that P2P IPTV will contribute to increase the overall Internet traffic. In this context, it is important to measure the impact of P2P IPTV on the networks and to characterize this traffic. Dur- ing the 2006 FIFA World Cup, we performed an extensive measurement campaign. We measured network traffic generated by broadcasting soc- cer games by the most popular P2P IPTV applications, namely PPLive, PPStream, SOPCast and TVAnts. From the collected data, we charac- terized the P2P IPTV traffic structure at different time scales by using wavelet based transform method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work, which presents a complete multiscale analysis of the P2P IPTV traffic. Our results show that the scaling properties of the TCP traffic present periodic behavior whereas the UDP traffic is stationary and lead to long- range depedency characteristics. For all the applications, the download traffic has different characteristics than the upload traffic. The signaling traffic has a significant impact on the download traffic but it has negligible impact on the upload. Both sides of the traffic and its granularity has to be taken into account to design accurate P2P IPTV traffic models.