Short Report On P2ptv Impacts And Challenges

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Let’s first define what P2PTV entail. P2PTV is a term that stands for Peer-To-Peer software application. This network was designed to redistribute video streams in a real time P2P network. Typically, the distributed video streams originate from either TV channels worldwide but probably also originate from other resources. Understand how P2PTV works, we must understand how the concept of P2P applies. For P2P, the overall available bandwidth is a source contributed by each user. Therefore we can understand that the available resources increases if there are more users in the video streaming. Some of the applications of P2PTV include free movies and drama series provided through real-time streaming and the capability of distributing HD-quality video content. With this it allows internet making use of the user’s upload capacity, at low costs and with guaranteed QoS. However, the benefits of using P2PTV also has it’s impacts and it’s challenges such as the use of P2PTV may consume all of your bandwidth making other programs to lag. The impacts and challenges will be further discussed in the discussion.

DISCUSSION:

Impacts:

The potential to make any TV channel globally available is the draw available by any individual feeding the stream into the network. A scalable distribution among a large audience allowed due to the feeding stream into the network by an individual feeding where each peer joins to watch it. Worldwide availability and low costs of content distribution made by P2PTV are examples it has to offer to the television industries. Although this is the case, the P2PTV technique causes certain technical incapacities. These difficulties include the ability to allow users to become broadcasters and hence giving them the possibility to re-distribute contents (illegally) they were able to obtain to not only viewers outside the region the broadcast is designated for but also non-paying viewers. The fact that broadcasting through this system costs much less than the alternatives and is able to be done by private individuals makes it another important impact. This misuse of the P2PTV harms severely the television industry. Then we consider the consumers of P2PTV technology that might be offered the possibility to receive content that was otherwise not available to them. The content aggregator from using P2PTV is of interest. It is used as a new method for spreading television content with the benefit of reaching more consumers connected to the internet. Relatively low cost by this distribution method is very relative to consumer’s upload capacity. Furthermore, we should take into consideration how important trends influence the possible futures of P2PTV. Crucial factors determining the consumer adoption is it has an effect the time consumers spend on watching television online. Illegal rebroadcasting of television content is already happening at small scale and growing much larger to a more substantial size and due to this, broadcasters are force to reduce the cost of providing a streaming service to the Internet and unable to reach a world-wide population of users. Lastly, the traffic P2P-TV application generates a potential growth that happens without control. This in turn causes a certain degradation of service quality perceived by users and also a collapse of network functionalities.

Challenges:

No quality of service (QoS): Compared to unicasting (the standard server-client architecture used in streaming media) no one can guarantee a reliable stream, since every user is a rebroadcaster. Each viewer is a part of a chain of viewers who can all have a negative influence on the reliability of the stream (by having a slow PC, a filled downlink or uplink or an unreliable consumer grade DSL or cable connection).

Less control. If a broadcaster prefers to limit access to their content based on regions, and would like good data on viewer behaviour, such as volume, trends and viewing time, then a traditional broadcasting solution offers more control.

Network usage and ISP’s : Already a large quantity, somewhere around 70% according to recent numbers, of the total internet traffic is used for P2P file sharing (Werbach, 2008). Most of this traffic is used for sharing copyrighted video. Already ISP’s have tried to filter or block this traffic which has spurred much debate on whether ISP’s have the right to decide what types of packages run through their network. So far ISP’s are not allowed to block or filter any traffic and for the remainder of this research we will assume that this will not happen. But as this could change we will bear in mind that the cooperation of ISP’s is needed for the usage of P2PTV systems.

The increasing popularity of applications for video-streaming based on P2P paradigm (P2P-TV) is raising the interest of both broadcasters and network operators. The fear that the traffic offered by these applications can grow without control, affecting other services, and possibly causing network congestion and collapse.

Internet Television is perhaps the most important emerging application in these days. While services based on traditional client-server technologies such as YouTube are currently widely used, new applications are emerging that exploit the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm to broadcast television over the Internet. However, network operators fear the potential impact that these application may have on the network, since they can offer a significant load on the system, which can cause network congestion and possibly collapse, with the failure of the P2PTV service itself

Recently, P2P streaming has received much attention as a new technology for delivering multimedia content .This technology is inherent to the overlay network which is constructed by the logical connections among the end-users, which are known as peers. Therefore, the management of peers (overlay) on top of the internet is an important aspect from the network point of view, which concerns distributing the load among the participant peers, maintaining the logical connections between the senders and the receivers to pursue low communication latency, enhancing the throughput, and monitoring link failure and churn of peers.

In mesh based Peer-to-Peer streaming (P2P-TV) systems, the real-time encoded video is sliced in small pieces called chunks, which are distributed over an overlay topology exploiting a fully distributed epidemic approach. Chunks have to be received by peers within a deadline of few seconds in order to guarantee real-time constraints. In these systems, download rate is dictated by video rate, which is limited by definition; the source peer emits chunks in real time at "constant" rate and all peers must trade them minimizing delays and chunk losses to guarantee real-timelike constraints and the best Quality of Experience (QoE) to users. Common assumptions about this kind of systems are that the upload capacity of peers constitutes the main bottleneck to system performance, and each peer is supposed to instantaneously have a perfect view of the internal state of other peers. While the former assumption is often meet in practice, latency among peers makes the latter unrealistic. In mesh-based P2P-TV systems, peers are usually organized into a generic overlay topology, and neighboring peers exchange chunks periodically.

The actual P2PTV application is used to avoid both the burden of handling TCP and the unnecessary delay due to retransmissions and congestion control. However, this poses the problem of how to handle the congestion control and, in particular, how to limit the amount of information a peer transmits, being download rate limited by video-rate. Controlling therefore the uplink bandwidth utilization is a key problem, which has been so far marginally considered by the research community.

Standard media players, like Windows Media Player or VLC, are not able to correctly use the P2PTV technology as the producers of commercial media players have not adopted the P2PTV technology and implemented this in their software. In order to make correct buffering, tracker contact and upload capabilities possible a media player plug-in or special media player software package is needed. This means that every user that wants to receive or broadcast a stream will need to install this piece of software. Like with most new internet services this also means that it will be needed to open up ports in the hard- or software firewalls. In consumer internet setups this will probably not lead to many problems as these are most commonly protected by (the standard operating system’s) software firewall, which will prompt the user whether or not it wants to have the port unblocked on first use.