The success of peer-to-peer live video streaming in wireline networks has inspired the development of mobile peer-to-peer streaming technologies. However, the traditional peer-to-peer live streaming techniques have been found to perform sub-optimal in wireless networks. Furthermore, the increasing energy consumption in wireless networks due to inefficient communication protocols has resulted in the need to develop greener, more energy efficient communication solutions. Therefore, we present Unwired, an OMNet++ based simulator for the development of mobile peer-to-peer live video streaming techniques. We have built upon the DenaCast simulation framework for peer-to-peer live streaming to include wireless peers. The major contributions to the existing framework are in the form of introducing mobility on the wireless peers, enabling hand-offs for the mobile peers and providing a power component on each mobile peer to monitor the energy consumption by the peers during video streaming. We simulate a hybrid network including both wireline and wireless peers and study the similarities and differences in the performance of the two types of peers. Finally, we explain the utility of the power component in the future development of energy efficient communication protocols for wireless networks.

The proliferation of smart devices for mobile networks is a major traffic generator nowadays. These devices provide the ability to receive media content in nearly every situation. Despite that video streaming in high quality is getting more and more popular in mobile scenarios, the performance and bottlenecks of mobile applications over wireless networks, especially, during the transmission of media streams, are poorly understood yet. In order to tackle this new challenge, we present an Android based framework to capture the relevant wireless network behavior, geo-coordinates and packet traces for popular streaming applications on Android certified devices. A dataset has been obtained by measurement trials, which have been performed in a 3G network for both HTTP and peer-to-peer video streaming applications. The trials comprise also an additional WiFi measurement for comparison purposes. The presented dataset enables future research to determine the quality of service and network characteristics of different streaming methodologies, which are affected by the typical conditions encountered in wireless networks, like hand-over effects, signal fading, connection losses etc. We hope that both, the presented dataset and the framework, may prove to be useful for the traffic measurement and the multimedia research communities.

The amount of mobile video streaming traffic is rapidly growing and a potential candidate to reduce the load on the content delivery infrastructure is given by the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm. One might argue about the adequacy of P2P in this mobile context, yet, it has already become reality. Popular P2P streaming networks like SopCast or TVU networks have recently deployed their apps for mobile devices. In this paper the current state of a location-aware measurement framework is presented, which was mainly developed to evaluate P2P systems in cellular networks. We use our generic framework to present the first measurement study that investigates the behavior of the popular P2P video streaming application SopCast when it is operating in a UMTS High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network and compare the results with reference Ethernet measurements. The aim of this study is to discover the impact of cellular networks and user mobility on the performance of such P2P applications. In particular we could observe that as consequence some of the drawbacks are characterized by poor connectivity among peers and negligible upload contributions.

In this paper, we present a first analysis of the application of Raptor codes in the domain of P2P streaming. With the help of fountain codes, such as Raptor codes, it is possible to completely omit content reconciliation in P2P networks. Hereby, the scheduling complexity of the data dissemination is greatly reduced. The contributions of the paper are the following: First, we present our implementation of the Raptor code used in the performed experiments and elaborate the application of the Raptor code in the scenario of P2P streaming. Second, we investigate the choice of the prevalent parameters, necessary to achieve the best trade-off between performance, computational complexity and resilience of the Raptor code. We use the obtained results to evaluate the general feasibility of using Raptor codes to improve the performance of P2P streaming networks. In addition, we report some insights arising from the practical experience with Raptor codes.

As mobile devices and cellular networks become ubiquitous, first apps for popular P2P video streaming networks emerge. We have observed that when these applications operate in cellular networks, they don't upload video traffic back to other peers. This paper presents a reason for this behavior and proposes a viable solution to exploit the uplink capacity of mobile devices more efficiently. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to propose the usage of Raptor codes to increase the upload throughput of mobile P2P applications.

The extensive growth of peer-to-peer video applications (P2PTV) indicates the evolutionary path towards the next generation of networking. To enhance the quality of experience for P2PTV users, new P2P video traffic models are required. These models are often developed by measurement-driven performance modeling based upon statistical analysis. However, this type of analysis can be a challenging task, due to the complexity and especially, with large sample sizes, the sheer quantity of the data. For this reason, preliminary data examination by graphical means and appropriate visualization techniques can be of great value. In this paper, the versatile network traffic analyzer Atheris will be introduced. It is an essential part of a comprehensive traffic measurement and analysis concept to cope with the rapid deployment of P2PTV applications and their overlay structures. Atheris has been designed specially for measuring P2P applications and for visualizing their inherent properties. As a part of its functionality, Atheris performs traffic measurements at the packet layer, data extraction, flow analysis and enables the visual inspection of statistical characteristics. Furthermore, an evaluation of overlay structures by bandwidth estimation techniques and an overview of the statistical P2P traffic features are provided.

Currently, the rapid development of new multimedia services including VoIP, video streaming and video on demand as well as IPTV and the integration of triple play into the service portfolios of ISPs and network operators indicate an evolutionary path towards next generation networking. Peer-topeer (P2P) overlay networks are used with growing intensity to implement the content dissemination and control planes of many new portals and their multimedia service components like GoalBit, Zattoo, PPLive, SopCast, Voddler or Skype. However, despite intensive measurement campaigns (cf. [3], [4] among others), publicly available integrated systems to monitor streaming traffic in such networks and to analyze its features are rarely provided yet. The presented JAVA tool Atheris constitutes an approach to overcome this deficiency.