Location-Aware Traffic Analysis of a Peer-to-Peer Streaming Application in a HSPA Network

Abstract

The amount of mobile video streaming traffic is rapidly growing and a potential candidate to reduce the load on the content delivery infrastructure is given by the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm. One might argue about the adequacy of P2P in this mobile context, yet, it has already become reality. Popular P2P streaming networks like SopCast or TVU networks have recently deployed their apps for mobile devices. In this paper the current state of a location-aware measurement framework is presented, which was mainly developed to evaluate P2P systems in cellular networks. We use our generic framework to present the first measurement study that investigates the behavior of the popular P2P video streaming application SopCast when it is operating in a UMTS High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network and compare the results with reference Ethernet measurements. The aim of this study is to discover the impact of cellular networks and user mobility on the performance of such P2P applications. In particular we could observe that as consequence some of the drawbacks are characterized by poor connectivity among peers and negligible upload contributions.