Welcome to the home of PPETP, the Peer-to-Peer Epi-Transport Protocol

Welcome!

Welcome to the home page of PPETP, the Peer-to-Peer Epi-Transport Protocol currently developed by the DSP group of the University of Udine.

What is this? YAPPP? (Yet Another Peer-to-Peer Protocol?)

Yes, I know, P2P it is quite fashionable nowdays, but we think that PPETP is something different.

PPETP is a protocol originally designed for live streaming over networks of residential nodes. Since its beginning it evolved and now it could be described as an overlay multicast protocol, suitable for streaming high-quality content over a network made of nodes with limited upload capabilities.

PPETP has been specifically designed for streaming over networks made of residential nodes. This means that PPETP has built-in several features that allows to counteract the typical problems associated with streaming over P2P networks of residential nodes. For example, PPETP provides

• Built-in NAT traversal procedures
• Robustness with respect to packet losses, due both to network congestion or sudden node departure.
• Robustness against malicious users. PPETP is inherently robust, for example, against the stream poisoning attack.

PPETP is very flexible. Differently from many application-specific P2P structures, PPETP is seen by the programmer as a multicast transport unreliable protocol that can transmit any sequence of packets. This makes possible to use PPETP with any type of content (audio, video, whiteboard, 3D, smells, ...) with any possible format (H.264, scalable, multiple descriptions, even encrypted data). PPETP does not mandate a specific network structure and it allows for several solutions: from networks managed by a central node to networks managed in a distributed way.

Moreover, the API (Application Programming Interface) of PPETP has been designed in order to make it very similar to an API for multicast communication. In the simplest (and, we believe, most common) case, everything a node needs to join a PPETP session is just an IP address and a "pseudo-port" number. This will make easier to adapt existing applications and protocols, such as RTP, SDP, and so on.

So, what do I find on this site?

On this site you will find (when we will be ready...) software and documentation related to PPETP, for example

The PPETP library.

An open source library implementing PPETP and that you can use in your programs without knowing all the protocol details.

Satellite software

That is, some software that uses or it is in some way related with PPETP; for example

ppetp2udp

A program that reads packets from a PPETP session and forward them to an UDP port. This program allows to use with PPETP any program that can read data from UDP.

udp2ppetp

A program that reads data from an UDP port and forward them to a PPETP session.

Players and streamers

Some open source software modified to be PPETP compatible.

Wireshark software

A dissector for PPETP packets

Documentation

related with PPETP

As you can see, we have not an official release yet, but we are pretty confident to be able to produce one soon. So, stay tuned...