Peer - to - Peer multimedia streaming monitoring system

Nowadays, many companies provide on-demand or live multimedia content over the Internet. The success of the content provider is measured by the number of subscribers. There are, however, pirates that re-distribute obtained content illegally, thus cutting into the legitimate subscribers base. The content providers would like to know how serious the problem is in order to address it. The goal of our project is to develop a monitoring system to help the content provider to learn: what is the popularity of the pirated content, who is using the illegal service, and where are the illegal users? Our system focuses on services that are based on P2P streaming technology because its costeffectiveness and scalability advantages are appealing to pirates. We aim to develop a system that can monitor an arbitrary P2P streaming system. To achieve this goal we will address the following questions in our project: How to perform analysis to understand the audience? What measurement data can we collect? How to measure a high-dynamic P2P network? How to gather data from an arbitrary (and proprietary) P2P streaming application? In the end, we present a distributed monitoring system based on passive measurement. We conducted a set of evaluation experiments on three popular and representative P2P streaming systems: Acestream, Sopcast and Peerflix. The evaluation results proved the effectiveness of our measurement approach and strategy. Peer-to-Peer multimedia streaming monitoring system iii