Survey on P2P Overlay streaming clients

Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems grow in numbers and potential and several commercial products are already competing. Internet home users - through the diffusion of xDSL connections - represent the potential market of IPTV channels that Content Generators may distribute at reduced costs. This work describes the state of the art of P2P streaming clients and poses some questions about the end-user perspective in heterogeneous networks. To this aim, a representative set of experiments has been performed on a popular P2P system. The client offers live streaming content from some European broadcasters, start-up delay is a few seconds and the user satisfaction rank is good. The trend moves toward solutions that try to optimize the whole network stack, pursuing flexibility in terms of user needs and system requirements. This work is aimed at focusing on the key-drives in the design of P2P streaming clients. © 2009 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.