A robust P2P streaming architecture and its application to a high quality live-video service

This paper explores the design of a P2P architecture that sends real-time video over the Internet. The aim is to provide good quality levels in a highly dynamic P2P topology, where the frequent connections/disconnections of the nodes makes it difficult to offer the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) needed by the client. We study a multi-source streaming approach where the stream is decomposed into several flows sent by different peers to each client including some level of redundancy, in order to cope with the fluctuations in network connectivity. We employ the recently proposed PSQA technology for evaluating automatically the perceived quality at the client side. We introduce a mathematical programming model to maximize the global expected QoE of the network (evaluated using PSQA), selecting a P2P connection scheme which enhances topology robustness. In addition, we provide an approximated algorithm to solve the proposed model, and we apply it to solve a case study based on real life data.