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

Peer-to-peer stream merging for stored multimedia

In recent years, with the fast development of resource capability of both the Internet and personal computers, multimedia applications like video-on-demand (VOD) streaming have gained dramatic growth and been shown to be potential killer applications in the current and next-generation Internet. Scalable deployment of these applications has become a hot problem area due to the potentially high server and network bandwidth required in these systems.The conventional approach in a VOD streaming system dedicates a media stream for each client request, which is not scalable in a wide-area delivery system serving potentially very large numbers of clients. Recently, various efficient delivery techniques have been proposed to improve the scalability of VOD delivery systems. One approach is to use a scalable delivery protocol based on multicast, such as periodic broadcast or stream merging. These protocols have been mostly developed for single-server based systems and attempt to have each media stream serve as many clients as possible, so as to minimize the required server and network bandwidth. However, the performance improvements possible with techniques that deliver all streams from a single server are limited, especially regarding the required network bandwidth. Another approach is based on proxy caching and content replication, such as in content delivery networks (CDN). Although this approach is able to effectively distribute load across multiple CDN servers, the cost of this approach may be high.With the focus on further improving the system efficiency regarding the server and network bandwidth requirement, a new scalable streaming protocol is developed in this work. It adapts a previously proposed technique called hierarchical multicast stream merging (HMSM) to use a peer-to-peer delivery approach. To be more efficient in media delivery, the conventional early merging policy associated with HMSM is extended to be compatible with the peer-to-peer environment, and various peer selection policies are designed for initiation of media streams. The impact of limited peer resource capability is also studied in this work. In the performance study, a number of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new protocol and various design policies, and promising results are reported

RTSP-based Mobile Peer-to-Peer Streaming System

Peer-to-peer is emerging as a potentially disruptive technology for content distribution in the mobile Internet. In addition to the already well-known peer-to-peer file sharing, real-time peer-to-peer streaming is gaining popularity. This paper presents an effective real-time peer-to-peer streaming system for the mobile environment. The basis for the system is a scalable overlay network which groups peer into clusters according to their proximity using RTT values between peers as a criteria for the cluster selection. The actual media delivery in the system is implemented using the partial RTP stream concept: the original RTP sessions related to a media delivery are split into a number of so-called partial streams according to a predefined set of parameters in such a way that it allows low-complexity reassembly of the original media session in real-time at the receiving end. Partial streams also help in utilizing the upload capacity with finer granularity than just per one original stream. This is beneficial in mobile environments where bandwidth can be scarce

Increasing Service Quality Of Multimedia Streaming Using Hybrid Peer-To-Peer Model

The peer-to-peer file sharing application has become increasingly popular for Internet users since the 1999 introduction of Napster. In the past decade, several more applications have been invented, such as Gnutella, FastTrack, Chord, Freenet, and BitTorrent. However, all of these applications use the downloading method that requires the source to be downloaded from one or more resources to one requesting peer. Now, alternative methods of file sharing delivery have been introduced; some examples include CELL, CollectCast, DAC, and GnuStream dan PAST, all ofwhich use streaming to deliver media content to the user. Because peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming systems- such as Video on Demand and IPTV - are popular among Internet users, developers and researchers have a tendency to combine the Video on Demand and peer-to-peer topology into one system. This way, the channel program of Video on Demand or IPTV can be inexpensively distributed on the Internet by utilizing the availability of peers; each peer becomes both a receiver and a supplier to another peer. Many problems are associated with media streaming of file sharing applications, some of which include query-saturated networks, high latency in locating content, attempting to preserve uninterrupted streaming sessions, high peer load, flash crowds, and bottlenecks. As such, proposed system has been introduced in an effort to reduce the maintenance cost of overlay network topology, the routing and access costs of lookup services, and to service costs of streaming sessions. Proposed system is a combination of pure, client-server, and hierarchical peer-to-peer topology, and is categorized as a hybrid peer-to-peer business model. Five experiments, consisting of four simulations and an expert evaluation, have been executed to determine the performance, scalability, maintenance, reliability and usability. The results reveal that proposed system can improve the quality of file sharing applications by reducing path length, peer load, and total usage while maintaining the overlay network topology in various chum rates, as well as locating a file in lookup services. The results also show that proposed system has sufficient scalability whenever the network size and number of queries increase

A Comprehensive Analysis of Swarming-based Live Streaming to Leverage Client Heterogeneity

Due to missing IP multicast support on an Internet scale, over-the-top media streams are delivered with the help of overlays as used by content delivery networks and their peer-to-peer (P2P) extensions. In this context, mesh/pull-based swarming plays an important role either as pure streaming approach or in combination with tree/push mechanisms. However, the impact of realistic client populations with heterogeneous resources is not yet fully understood. In this technical report, we contribute to closing this gap by mathematically analysing the most basic scheduling mechanisms latest deadline first (LDF) and earliest deadline first (EDF) in a continuous time Markov chain framework and combining them into a simple, yet powerful, mixed strategy to leverage inherent differences in client resources. The main contributions are twofold: (1) a mathematical framework for swarming on random graphs is proposed with a focus on LDF and EDF strategies in heterogeneous scenarios; (2) a mixed strategy, named SchedMix, is proposed that leverages peer heterogeneity. The proposed strategy, SchedMix is shown to outperform the other two strategies using different abstractions: a mean-field theoretic analysis of buffer probabilities, simulations of a stochastic model on random graphs, and a full-stack implementation of a P2P streaming system.Comment: Technical report and supplementary material to http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7497234

Distributed Optimization of P2P Media Delivery Overlays

Media streaming over the Internet is becoming increasingly popular. Currently, most media is delivered using global content-delivery networks, providing a scalable and robust client-server model. However, content delivery infrastructures are expensive. One approach to reduce the cost of media delivery is to use peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks, where nodes share responsibility for delivering the media to one another. The main challenges in P2P media streaming using overlay networks include: (i) nodes should receive the stream with respect to certain timing constraints, (ii) the overlay should adapt to the changes in the network, e.g., varying bandwidth capacity and join/failure of nodes, (iii) nodes should be intentivized to contribute and share their resources, and (iv) nodes should be able to establish connectivity to the other nodes behind NATs. In this work, we meet these requirements by presenting P2P solutions for live media streaming, as well as proposing a distributed NAT traversal solution. First of all, we introduce a distributed market model to construct an approximately minimal height multiple-tree streaming overlay for content delivery, in gradienTv. In this system, we assume all the nodes are cooperative and execute the protocol. However, in reality, there may exist some opportunistic nodes, free-riders, that take advantage of the system, without contributing to content distribution. To overcome this problem, we extend our market model in Sepidar to be effective in deterring free-riders. However, gradienTv and Sepidar are tree-based solutions, which are fragile in high churn and failure scenarios. We present a solution to this problem in GLive that provides a more robust overlay by replacing the tree structure with a mesh. We show in simulation, that the mesh-based overlay outperforms the multiple-tree overlay. Moreover, we compare the performance of all our systems with the state-of-the-art NewCoolstreaming, and observe that they provide better playback continuity and lower playback latency than that of NewCoolstreaming under a variety of experimental scenarios. Although our distributed market model can be run against a random sample of nodes, we improve its convergence time by executing it against a sample of nodes taken from the Gradient overlay. The Gradient overlay organizes nodes in a topology using a local utility value at each node, such that nodes are ordered in descending utility values away from a core of the highest utility nodes. The evaluations show that the streaming overlays converge faster when our market model works on top of the Gradient overlay. We use a gossip-based peer sampling service in our streaming systems to provide each node with a small list of live nodes. However, in the Internet, where a high percentage of nodes are behind NATs, existing gossiping protocols break down. To solve this problem, we present Gozar, a NAT-friendly gossip-based peer sampling service that: (i) provides uniform random samples in the presence of NATs, and (ii) enables direct connectivity to sampled nodes using a fully distributed NAT traversal service. We compare Gozar with the state-of-the-art NAT-friendly gossip-based peer sampling service, Nylon, and show that only Gozar supports one-hop NAT traversal, and its overhead is roughly half of Nylon’s

P2P STREAMING MEDIA INDUSTRY IN CHINA

The peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming media industry opened up a new era for the cyber age, has had a significant effect on many people?s leisure time, and has changed the way many people use entertainment. Over the past few years, this industry has developed dramatically in China, and it is thriving. In terms of the current situation, the P2P streaming media industry holds typical Chinese features that both enrich the audience?s cultural life, and have some impact on other kinds of mass media. This paper analyzes the P2P streaming media industry in China in order to recommend solutions to the challenges faced by the industry. It introduces various technical terms related to P2P and describes the overall industrial situation of P2P streaming media in China. It utilizes Porter?s Five Forces model for an analysis of the entire industry and assesses key success factors (KSFs). Concurrently, this article identifies the competitive advantages of P2P steaming media over other forms of media delivery, and examines its influence on other industries. It is important to note that P2P streaming media does face various obstacles in its developmental stages, and it is developing, but this paper makes strategic recommendations for solutions to the challenges that P2P streaming media faces

Video streaming in unstructured peer-to-peer networks

With the increase in demand for streaming media capabilities across the Internet, the focus has shifted from traditional client-server to peer-to-peer approaches. Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) have also recently moved from web acceleration to media streaming. P2P CDNs can be used both as a delivery mechanism and as an independent network. However, media streaming poses different challenges from traditional content distribution, such as in-order distribution; and p2p networks use more traffic, and lack QoS control and measurement. In addition, constraints like a high churn rate and small upload bandwidths can affect the video playback at the peers. We find that certain strategies can be used to optimize the streaming experience at the receiving nodes, while also being scalable and robust to churn. This project presents the experimental results of MPEG-4 video streaming using different approaches in unstructured p2p networks

Adaptive Streaming in P2P Live Video Systems: A Distributed Rate Control Approach

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is a recently proposed standard that offers different versions of the same media content to adapt the delivery process over the Internet to dynamic bandwidth fluctuations and different user device capabilities. The peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm for video streaming allows to leverage the cooperation among peers, guaranteeing to serve every video request with increased scalability and reduced cost. We propose to combine these two approaches in a P2P-DASH architecture, exploiting the potentiality of both. The new platform is made of several swarms, and a different DASH representation is streamed within each of them; unlike client-server DASH architectures, where each client autonomously selects which version to download according to current network conditions and to its device resources, we put forth a new rate control strategy implemented at peer site to maintain a good viewing quality to the local user and to simultaneously guarantee the successful operation of the P2P swarms. The effectiveness of the solution is demonstrated through simulation and it indicates that the P2P-DASH platform is able to warrant its users a very good performance, much more satisfying than in a conventional P2P environment where DASH is not employed. Through a comparison with a reference DASH system modeled via the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) approach, the new system is shown to outperform such reference architecture. To further validate the proposal, both in terms of robustness and scalability, system behavior is investigated in the critical condition of a flash crowd, showing that the strong upsurge of new users can be successfully revealed and gradually accommodated.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figures, this work has been submitted to the IEEE journal on selected Area in Communication

Network coding: from theory to media streaming

Network coding has recently emerged as an alternative to traditional routing algorithms in communication systems. In network coding, the network nodes can combine the packets they receive before forwarding them to the neighbouring nodes. Intensive research efforts have demonstrated that such a processing in the network nodes can provide advantages in terms of throughput or robustness. These potentials, combined with the advent of ad hoc and wireless delivery architectures have triggered the interest of research community about the application of the network coding principles to streaming applications. This paper describes the potentials of network coding in emerging delivery architectures such as overlay or peer-to-peer networks. It overviews the principles of practical network coding algorithms and outlines the challenges posed by multimedia streaming applications. Finally, it provides a survey of the recent work on the application of network coding to media streaming applications, both in wireless or wired communication scenarios. Promising results have been demonstrated where network coding is able to bring benefits in media streaming applications. However, delay and complexity constraints are often posed as the main challenging issues that still prevent the wide-scale deployment of network coding algorithms in multimedia communication