Minimizing the Impact of P2P-TV Applications in Access Links

Many studies are concentrated on provisioning certain levels of Quality of Service (QoS) employing different approaches related to different areas (control congestion algorithms, transport protocols, etc). This paper is focused on the improvement of the QoS of peer-to-peer TV (P2P-TV), and in particular, it proposes a methodology to minimise the impact of bursty traffic in the buffer of access devices using a traffic shaping technique. This paper shows how QoS can be improved by means of traffic shaping, specifically by using smoothing techniques. Some parameters such as packet loss, delay and throughput of a popular P2PTV application are analysed. The competition for the available bandwidth between the P2P-TV and some Transport Control Protocol (TCP) traffic flows is also studied. The results show a reduction in terms of loss percentage when the traffic of the P2P-TV application is smoothed, introducing small delays as a counterpart.