GRAPES: a Generic Environment for P2P Streaming

Practical implementation of new P2P streaming systems requires a lot of coding and is often tedious and costly, slowing down the technology transfer from the research community to real users. GRAPES aims at relieving this burden, and speed-up application development, by providing a set of open-source components conceived as basic build- ing blocks for building new P2P streaming applications. GRAPES is designed to be usable in different environments and situations, to have a minimal set of pre-requisites and dependencies, and not to impose any particular constraints on applications using it. The development of streamers in the Napa-Wine project [1] has shown that using GRAPES P2P streaming applications with different characteristics can be developed by only writing a small amount of glue code that connects the desired functionalities and dictates the architecture of the streamer.