Peercast Live Streaming Analysis & Testing

The high bandwidth required by live streaming (audio/video) limits the number of clients that can be served by a source using unicast. The best solution would have been IP-Multicast, but suffers from poor deployment hence the evolution of Application level Multicast.The p2p technology evolution overcame the bandwidth bottlenecks represented by the limited server capacities, favoring the diffusion of even more bandwidth demanding applications such as live streaming. The peers in P2P system form ad-hoc networks to contribute resources to the community and in turn use resources provided by other peers for their own goals.This work contains a discussion of the tree based overlay called Peercast live streaming system that uses clients to forward stream to other peers. A full description of the general idea of peer to peer live streaming aspects including the tree structure and data driven overlay and their constraints pointing out comparison.Followed by detail analysis of Peercast, its architecture and protocols involved together with its modules. Finally peercast system was built in fedora core 8 pc and tested for live streaming. Lastly analysis of the results collected during the peercast live streaming test where It was evidently shown that peercast worked fine.