Abstract
Despite the popularity of streaming applications over Internet, little is known about its practical properties which could be potentially exploited to guide the system design of next generation peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. In this paper, we hence investigate the problem of understanding and supporting the two types of dominant streaming services - live broadcasting and on-demand streaming - with high service availability and system scalability. We make a measurement study to traditional but popular client/server (C/S) systems to reveal many fundamental and interesting observations with the benefit of totally more than 30,000,000 real workload traces. The anatomy particularly focuses on request and popularity issues which play a vital role to the system performance and also characterize evolutional user behaviors in the service community. The inherent request characteristics in live broadcasting service and drawbacks of classical cache-and-relay (CR) scheme in on-demand streaming further motivate us to discuss essential challenges and open questions in the context of supporting the two services over P2P networks.