Analysis of PPLive through active and passive measurements

The P2P-IPTV is an emerging class of Internet applications that is becoming very popular. The growing popularity of these rather bandwidth demanding multimedia streaming applications has the potential to flood the Internet with a huge amount of traffic. In this paper we present an investigation of the popular P2P-IPTV application PPLive exploiting a measurement strategy that combines both active and passive measures. To this end, we use a crawler that allows the study of the topological characteristics of the overlay of one of the PPlive channels; concurrently, we perform passive measures on a PPlive client we run to join the crawled channel. We successively cross correlate information we obtained from the two measurements to assess the accuracy of the data captured by the crawler. Our results reveal the potentials and the limits of PPLive active measures strategies.