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