An alliance based peering scheme for P2P live media streaming

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2004

Given the fact that the current Internet does not widely support IP Multicast while content-distribution-networks technologies are costly, the concept of peer-to-peer could be a promising start for enabling large-scale streaming systems. In our so-called Zigzag approach, we propose a method for clustering peers into a hierarchy called the administrative organization for easy management, and a method for building the multicast tree atop this hierarchy for efficient content transmission. In Zigzag, the multicast tree has a height logarithmic with the number of clients, and a node degree bounded by a constant. This helps reduce the number of processing hops on the delivery path to a client while avoiding network bottleneck. Consequently, the end-to-end delay is kept small. Although one could build a tree satisfying such properties easily, an efficient control protocol between the nodes must be in place to maintain the tree under the effects of network dynamics. Zigzag handles such situations gracefully requiring a constant amortized worst-case control overhead. Especially, failure recovery is done regionally with impact on at most a constant number of existing clients and with mostly no burden on the server.

2009 International Conference on Computer Technology and Development, 2009

To deliver media streaming applications efficiently, researchers have developed three practical mechanisms, each of which has its virtues and limitations: Infrastructure-based CDN, Proxy-based approaches and P2P Systems. To address some of the above system limitations we present an enhanced media streaming design. Our design organizes its network entities in a structured P2P manner to provide a large media storage and to dynamically participate in the media streaming delivery, where overlapping clusters, Proxy based, are to minimize delay of streaming service. Multiple servers besides offering increased resources and service availability allow a further reduction of network bandwidth usage. The challenge is how to use multiple servers efficiently to address both the scalability issue in centralized proxy systems and the unreliable service concern by only depending on the clients peering & proposing a distributed architecture that can timely serve the demanded media data and fairly allocate media streaming tasks across the system. Finally, an algorithm is introduced showing that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the workload posed on the origin server.

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 2008

Real-world live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming applications have been successfully deployed in the Internet, delivering live multimedia content to millions of users at any given time. With relative simplicity in design with respect to peer selection and topology construction protocols and without much algorithmic sophistication, current-generation live P2P streaming applications are able to provide users with adequately satisfying viewing experiences. That said, little existing research has provided sufficient insights on the time-varying internal characteristics of peer-to-peer topologies in live streaming. This article presents Magellan , our collaborative work with UUSee Inc., Beijing, China, for exploring and charting graph theoretical properties of practical P2P streaming topologies, gaining important insights in their topological dynamics over a long period of time. With more than 120 GB worth of traces starting September 2006 from a commercially deployed P2P live streaming syst...

2010

In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-assisted streaming have emerged as promising models for low-cost multimedia distribution to large scale user communities. In this paper, we study streaming of scalable video streams over these systems. Scalable video streams are composed of multiple layers and can easily be adapted according to the characteristics and needs of receivers. Thus, they can efficiently support a wide spectrum of heterogeneous peers participating in a P2P streaming system. We present an analytical model for forecasting the long-term behavior of a P2P streaming system with scalable video streams. Our analysis takes as inputs the characteristics of a dynamic P2P streaming system and the video streams. It then analytically computes the expected throughput of the streaming system and the expected video quality delivered to peers. The analysis also provides an upper bound on the maximum number of peers that can be admitted to the system at once (i.e., in flash crowd scenarios), while ensuring a certain video quality. We present a general analysis framework that can be customized to various practical P2P streaming systems with different characteristics. Then, we show the detailed analysis of a typical P2P streaming system and we explain how other systems can be analyzed using our model. We validate our analysis by comparing its results to those obtained from simulations, which confirm the accuracy of our analysis. Our analysis and simulations enable administrators of P2P streaming systems to predict the throughput and the video quality that can be delivered to users.

2011 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2011

In this paper we present an exploration of central coordination as a way of managing P2P live streaming overlays. The main point is to show the elements needed to construct a system with that approach. A key element in the feasibility of this approach is a near real-time optimization engine for peer selection. Peer organization in a way that enables high bandwidth utilization plus optimized peer selection based on multiple utility factors make it possible to achieve large source bandwidth savings and provide high quality of user experience. The benefits of our approach are also seen most when NAT constraints come into play.

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2013

The Video on Demand (VoD) service is becoming a dominant service in the telecommunication market due to the great convenience regarding the choice of content items and their independent viewing time. However, due to its high traffic demand nature, the VoD streaming systems are faced with the problem of huge amounts of traffic generated in the core of the network, especially for serving the requests for content items that are not in the top popularity range. Therefore, we propose a peer assisted VoD model that takes advantage of the clients unused uplink and storage capacity to serve requests for less popular items with the objective to keep the traffic on the periphery of the network, reduce the transport cost in the core of the network and make the system more scalable.

International Journal On …, 2010

P2P streaming has shown an alternative way of broadcasting media to the end users. It is theoretically more scalable than its client-server based counterpart but suffers from other issues arising from the dynamic nature of the system. This is built on top of the internet by forming an overlay network. End-users (peers) are the main sources of the overlay network, sharing their bandwidth, storage and memory. Peers join and leave freely, which dramatically affects, both on QoS and QoE. Furthermore, the interconnections among the peers are based on logical overlays, which are not harmonized with the physical underlay infrastructure. This article presents combinations of different techniques, namely stream redundancy, multi-source streaming and locality-awareness (network efficiency), in the context of live and video-on-demand broadcasting. A new technique is introduced to improve P2P performance and assess it via a comparative, simulation-based study. It is found that redundancy affects network utilization only marginally if traffic is kept at the edges via localization techniques; multisource streaming improves throughput, delay, and minimizing the streaming time.

Proceedings of the …, 2007

Peer-to-peer technologies are increasingly becoming the medium of choice for delivering media content, both professional and homegrown, to large user populations. Indeed, current P2P swarming systems have been shown to be very efficient for large-scale content distribution with few server resources. However, such systems have been designed for generic file distribution and provide a limited user experience for viewing media content. For example, users need to wait to download the full video before they can start watching it. In general, the main challenge resides in designing systems that ensure that users can start watching a movie at any point in time, with small start-up times and sustainable playback rates.

The goal of this paper is to minimize service dis- ruption, a unique phenomenon in peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming system and the major contributing factor to degrade user expe- rience. In order to improve its streaming quality and stability, a P2P system should select peers with abundant bandwidth resource and prospect longevity as the parents of other peers. Towards this end, we propose PRW (peer resilient weight), a metric to evaluate a peer's healthiness regarding these two aspects. The theoretical background of PRW originates from the optimization framework based on the generalized flow theory . To show PRW's applicability to a wide variety of P2P streaming solutions, we propose several parent selection algorithms guided by PRW under the single-tree, multi-tree, and mesh structures. Using MSN and PPLive traces, we find our algorithms to be able to maintain consistently low service disruption and low peer rejection, compared to several existing heuristics.

IET Communications, 2009

Peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm has provided a disruptive market opportunity to define cost-effective multimedia streaming services, but at the same time network-oblivious P2P applications have been posing substantial technical and social challenges on network efficiency, operator economics and user performance. While end users are concerned with quality upgrade, Internet content provider (ICP) considers more on service scale and Internet service provider (ISP) focuses on operating cost. In taming P2P for a more friendly large-scale application, this paper provides a framework of evaluating the P2P media streaming application performance from perspectives of all entities involved, that is ISP, ICP and end users. Three-level performance metrics are defined, essential concerns of each party are theoretically quantified and bottlenecks in affecting quality service are identified. In handling tussles between P2P performance against ISP traffic, system scale against cost and user QoS against Security, the authors present proposals in defining an unprecedented friendly and cost-effective P2P streaming application to achieve the ideal philosophy of 'more users ¼ better performance þ lower cost'. Based on the explorations in academy and industry, the authors envision that a large-scale streaming system will be built with a synergy of P2P and content distribution networks (CDN), and explore the feasibility of a general peer-server-peer (PSP) structure on the basis of our evaluation framework. With our analytical study and industrial deployment, this paper captures a certain essence of deploying large-scale P2P streaming application from a commercial and realistic point of view and suggests many avenues for addressing the emerging tensions between P2P application and network operators.