An IP-TV P2P streaming system that improves the viewing quality and confines the startup delay of regular audience

This paper investigates how a p2p television platform can take advantage of the presence of frequent channel viewers to grant them a more satisfying service than to less regular spectators, and how such privileged users can also be protected when unfavorable operating conditions manifest within the overlay. The explored idea is to learn beforehand about the users’ interests, monitoring their behavior in the recent past, in order to cluster them in groups that display different habits; then, the video chunk scheduling algorithm of the overlay is altered, with the aim of serving frequent spectators in a privileged manner, providing them with a better viewing experience and a faster access to the selected channel without overly penalizing less habitual customers. An analytical model is developed, to capture the difference in average startup delay that the proposed modifications introduce; several additional performance metrics are numerically determined, in order to thoroughly size up the performance of both groups of viewers. The obtained results show that a clear service differentiation is attained and demonstrate that, if bandwidth resources become scarce, frequent viewers are protected and still enjoy a broadcasting service of superior quality.