Daedalus: A media agnostic peer-to-peer architecture for IPTV distribution

Abstract: IPTV is gaining increasing attention. It is an expanding field where a lot of people are working hard to solve the problems that delay its wide-spread use. One major problem is that the existing IPTV distribution mechanisms do not seem to work well when applied on a large scale. Especially, IP multicast does not seem to meet the requirements of highly demanding IPTV services. In contrast, peer-to-peer architectures for distributing content have been available for a number of years (since the late 1990’s), and their success suggests that this is a promising alternative means of distributing content. Although peer-to-peer architectures are well known for file transfer, this kind of architecture has been used in this thesis for distributing streaming video flows. We combine results from two different approaches - IPTV and peer-to-peer systems - as part of our design and implementation of a new solution for distributing IPTV. Our proposal aims to avoid any weaknesses that the existing solutions have, whilst offering a viable solution for distributing live content.