Performance analysis of the Libswift P2P streaming protocol

Video distribution is nowadays the dominant source of Internet traffic, and recent studies show that it is expected to reach 90% of the global consumer traffic by the end of 2015. Peer-to-peer assisted solutions have been adopted by many content providers with the aim of improving the scalability and reliability of their distribution network. While many solutions have been proposed, virtually all of them are at the overlay level, and so rely on the standard functionality of the transport layer. The Peer-to-Peer Streaming Protocol workgroup of the IETF has adopted the Libswift transport-layer protocol that is targeted at P2P traffic. In this paper we describe the design features and a first implementation of the Libswift protocol, and a piece-picking protocol that uses the transport features of Libswift in an essential way. We investigate its performance on both high-end and power-constrained low-end devices, comparing it to the state-of-the-art in P2P protocols.