Behavior Dissection of NGWN Live Audio and Video Streaming Users with Enhanced and Efficient Modelling

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) live video streaming is an application-level approach providing ease of deployment with low cost as compared to the IP multicast and client/server (C/S) architecture. These systems solely rely on end-hosts to disseminate the content; therefore, their performance largely banks on end-hosts, called peers. Since peers themselves are controlled by users, users’ activities become activities of peers. In such a network, the highly dynamic behavior of users impacts the network performance. Therefore, for performance improvement, a thorough understanding of user behavior is crucial. To explore and understand user behavior, numerous studies have been carried out. However, user behavior is complex, having several elements with dependency relationships, which make it difficult for a single measurement study to represent it comprehensively. Therefore, this work takes a two-step approach. Firstly, it collects existing measurement studies and analyzes, compares, and contrasts them to extract user behavior metrics and their relationships from them. Secondly, in light of the observations gained, this research analyzes traces of user behavior collected from an operational system. Such an outcome is useful, on one hand, for user behavior modelling towards performance improvement in NGWN, and on the other hand, it provides insights for further measurements and analysis.