The state of peer-to-peer network simulators

Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results

CliqueStream: an efficient and fault-resilient live streaming network on a clustered peer-to-peer overlay

Several overlay-based live multimedia streaming platforms have been proposed in the recent peer-to-peer streaming literature. In most of the cases, the overlay neighbors are chosen randomly for robustness of the overlay. However, this causes nodes that are distant in terms of proximity in the underlying physical network to become neighbors, and thus data travels unnecessary distances before reaching the destination. For efficiency of bulk data transmission like multimedia streaming, the overlay neighborhood should resemble the proximity in the underlying network. In this paper, we exploit the proximity and redundancy properties of a recently proposed clique-based clustered overlay network, named eQuus, to build efficient as well as robust overlays for multimedia stream dissemination. To combine the efficiency of content pushing over tree structured overlays and the robustness of data-driven mesh overlays, higher capacity stable nodes are organized in tree structure to carry the long haul traffic and less stable nodes with intermittent presence are organized in localized meshes. The overlay construction and fault-recovery procedures are explained in details. Simulation study demonstrates the good locality properties of the platform. The outage time and control overhead induced by the failure recovery mechanism are minimal as demonstrated by the analysis.Comment: 10 page

Network aware P2P multimedia streaming: capacity or locality?

P2P content providers are motivated to localize traffic within Autonomous Systems and therefore alleviate the tension with ISPs stemming from costly inter-AS traffic generated by geographically distributed P2P users. In this paper, we first present a new three-tier framework to conduct a thorough study on the impact of various capacity aware or locality aware neighbor selection and chunk scheduling strategies. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid neighbor selection strategy with the flexibility to elect neighbors based on either type of network awareness with different probabilities. We find that network awareness in terms of both capacity and locality potentially degrades system QoS as a whole and that capacity awareness faces effort-based unfairness, but enables contribution-based fairness. Extensive simulations show that hybrid neighbor selection can not only promote traffic locality but lift streaming quality and that the crux of traffic locality promotion is active overlay construction. Based on this observation, we then propose a totally decentralized network awareness protocol, equipped with hybrid neighbor selection. In realistic simulation environments, this protocol can reduce inter-AS traffic from 95% to 38% a locality performance comparable with tracker-side strategies (35%) under the premise of high streaming quality. Our performance evaluation results provide valuable insights for both theoretical study on selfish topologies and real-deployed system design. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 2011 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P 2011), Kyoto, Japan, 31 August-2 September 2011. In Proceedings of P2P, 2011, p. 54-6

On game theoretic peer selection for resilient peer-to-peer media streaming

Peer-to-peer (P2P) media streaming quickly emerges as an important application over the Internet. A plethora of approaches have been suggested and implemented to support P2P media streaming. In our study, we first classified existing approaches and studied their characteristics by looking at three important quantities: number of upstream peers (parents), number of downstream peers (children), and average number of links per peer. In existing approaches, peers are assigned with a fixed number of parents without regard to their contributions, measured by the amount of outgoing bandwidths. Obviously, this is an undesirable arrangement as it leads to highly inefficient use of the P2P links. This observation motivates us to model the peer selection process as a cooperative game among peers. This results in a novel peer selection protocol such that the number of upstream peers of a peer is related to its outgoing bandwidth. Specifically, peers with larger outgoing bandwidth are given more parents, which make them less vulnerable to peer dynamics. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves delivery ratio using similar number of links per peer, comparing with existing approaches under a wide range of system parameters. © 2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Enabling Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Stored Video Streaming Service with QoS Support

This research aims to enable a large-scale, high-volume, peer-to-peer, stored-video streaming service over the Internet, such as on-line DVD rentals. P2P allows a group of dynamically organized users to cooperatively support content discovery and distribution services without needing to employ a central server. P2P has the potential to overcome the scalability issue associated with client-server based video distribution networks; however, it brings a new set of challenges. This research addresses the following five technical challenges associated with the distribution of streaming video over the P2P network: 1) allow users with limited transmit bandwidth capacity to become contributing sources, 2) support the advertisement and discovery of time-changing and time-bounded video frame availability, 3) Minimize the impact of distribution source losses during video playback, 4) incorporate user mobility information in the selection of distribution sources, and 5) design a streaming network architecture that enables above functionalities.To meet the above requirements, we propose a video distribution network model based on a hybrid architecture between client-server and P2P. In this model, a video is divided into a sequence of small segments and each user executes a scheduling algorithm to determine the order, the timing, and the rate of segment retrievals from other users. The model also employs an advertisement and discovery scheme which incorporates parameters of the scheduling algorithm to allow users to share their life-time of video segment availability information in one advertisement and one query. An accompanying QoS scheme allows reduction in the number of video playback interruptions while one or more distribution sources depart from the service prematurely.The simulation study shows that the proposed model and associated schemes greatly alleviate the bandwidth requirement of the video distribution server, especially when the number of participating users grows large. As much as 90% of load reduction was observed in some experiments when compared to a traditional client-server based video distribution service. A significant reduction is also observed in the number of video presentation interruptions when the proposed QoS scheme is incorporated in the distribution process while certain percentages of distribution sources depart from the service unexpectedly