BEAM: A Peer-to-Peer Framework for Live Media Streaming

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.

Computer Communications, 2009

P2P (peer-to-peer) technology has proved itself an efficient and cost-effective solution to support largescale multimedia streaming. Different from traditional P2P applications, the quality of P2P streaming is strictly determined by performance metrics such as streaming delay. To meet these requirements, previous studies resorted to intuitions and heuristics to construct peer selection solutions incorporating topology and proximity concerns. However, the impact of proximity-aware methodology and delay tolerance of peers on the scalability of P2P system remains an unanswered question. In this paper, we study this problem via an analytical approach. To address the challenge of incorporating Internet topology into P2P streaming analysis, we construct a H-sphere network model which maps the network topology from the space of discrete graph to the continuous geometric domain, meanwhile capturing the power-law property of Internet. Based on this model, we analyze a series of peer selection methods by evaluating their performance via key scalability metrics. Our analytical observations are further verified via simulation on Internet topologies.

2003

With the growth of computing power and the proliferation of broadband access to the Internet, media streaming has widely diffused. Although the proxy caching technique is one method to accomplish effective media streaming, it cannot adapt to the variations of user locations and diverse user demands. By using the P2P communication architecture, media streaming can be expected to smoothly react to network conditions and changes in user demands for media-streams. In this paper, we propose efficient methods to achieve continuous and scalable media streaming system. In our mechanisms, a media stream is divided into blocks for efficient use of network bandwidth and storage space. We propose two scalable search methods and two algorithms to determine an optimum provider peer from search results. Through several simulation experiments, we show that the FLS method can perform continuous media play-out while reducing the amount of search traffic to 1/6 compared with full flooding.

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.

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2017

In this study, a novel overlay architecture for constructing hierarchical and scalable clustering of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is proposed. The proposed architecture attempts to enhance the clustering of peers by incorporating join, split, merge and cluster leader election mechanisms in a fully distributed manner. It takes delay proximity of peers into account as distance measure. By constructing hierarchical clustering of peers, the control message overhead and maintenance such as host departure/host join overhead are decreased. Theoretical comparisons on overheads of the proposed system with that of other systems from literature are studied. The control mechanism for dynamic peer behaviour of the architecture is tested over PlanetLab. The performance metrics used are end-to-end delay, diameter, cluster head distance, occupancy rate, peer join latency, accuracy and correctness. The test results are compared with Hierarchical Ring Tree (HRT) and mOverlay architecture. In addition, a P2P video streaming application is run over the proposed network overlay. Streaming tests show that video streaming applications perform well in terms of received video quality if hierarchical clusters considering delay proximity are used as underlying network architecture.

Wireless Community Networks (WCNs) are bottom-up broadband networks empowering people with their on-line communication means. Too often, however, services tailored for their characteristics are missing, with the consequence that they have worse performance than what they could. We present here an adaptation of an Open Source P2P live streaming platform that works efficiently, and with good application-level quality, over WCNs. WCNs links are usually symmetric, or at least asymmetry is not by design as it is in ADSL, and a WCN topology is local and normally flat (contrary to the the global Internet), so that the P2P overlay used for video distribution can be adapted to the underlaying network characteristics. We exploit this observation to derive over- lay building strategies that make use of cross-layer information to reduce the impact of the P2P streaming on the WCN while maintaining good application performance. We experiment with a real application in real WCN nodes, both in the Community-Lab provided by the CONFINE EU Project and within an emulation framework based on Mininet, where we can build larger topologies and interact more efficiently with the mesh underlay, which is unfortunately not accessible in Community-Lab. The results show that, with the overlay building strategies proposed, the P2P streaming applications can reduce the load on the WCN to about one half, also equalizing the load on links. At the same time the delivery rate and delay of video chunks are practically unaffected.

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.

In recent years P2P technology has gained great popularity not only in file sharing applications but also in the field of video distribution. This work proposes a simple model to assess the performance a P2P system designed for video streaming can achieve, measured in terms of average video delivery rate. The model allows to compute system efficiency in a simple but accurate way through the partition of peers in two distinct populations: bad peers, that are not collaborative, and good peers, that contribute to share their video contents with others. As a meaningful example, it is employed to investigate the behavior of a real P2P prototype subject to high peer dynamics: its effectiveness is proved via experimental results, and sheds a new light on the way a streaming service overlay can be centrally and timely monitored.

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.

2011

This paper presents the GoalBit Starter platform. GoalBit is an open source peer-to-peer distribution system of realtime video streams over Internet. The main advantage of a P2P architecture is the possibility of using available upload bandwidth in the hosts connected. The main difficulty is that these hosts are typically highly dynamic, they continuously enter and leave the network. To deal with this problem a mesh connectivity approach is used (Bittorrentlike) where the stream is decomposed into several pieces and shared between different peers. Nowadays, the GoalBit platform is used by operators and by final users to broadcast their live contents. To illustrate its potential, we present some empirical results measured in an emulation of a Goal-Bit P2P streaming, with more than 300 peers concurrently connected.