A Case Study of Traffic Locality in Internet P2P Live Streaming Systems

With the ever-increasing P2P Internet traffic, recently much attention has been paid to the topology mismatch between the P2P overlay and the underlying network due to the large amount of cross-ISP traffic.  Mainly focusing on BitTorrent-like file sharing systems, several recent studies have demonstrated how to efficiently bridge the overlay and the underlying network by leveraging the existing infrastructure, such as CDN services or developing new application-ISP interfaces, such as P4P. However, so far the traffic locality in existing P2P live streaming systems has not been well studied. In this work, taking PPLive as an example, we examine traffic locality in Internet P2P streaming systems. Our measurement results on both popular and unpopular channels from various locations show that current PPLive traffic is highly localized at the ISP level. In particular, we find: (1) a PPLive peer mainly obtains peer lists referred by its connected neighbors (rather than tracker servers) and up to 90\% of listed peers are from the same ISP as the requesting peer; (2) the major portion of the streaming traffic received by a requesting peer (up to 88\% in popular channels) is served by peers in the same ISP as the requestor; (3) the top 10\% of the connected peers provide most (about 70\%) of the requested streaming data and these top peers have smaller RTT to the requesting peer.  Our study reveals that without using any topology information or demanding any infrastructure support, PPLive achieves such high ISP level traffic locality spontaneously with its decentralized, latency based, neighbor referral peer selection strategy. These findings provide some new insights for better understanding and optimizing the network- and user-level performance in practical P2P live streaming systems.