Peer Selection in Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems

One important task of any peer-to-peer streaming system (p2p-ss) is how to choose which peers should connect to which peers. How well a p2p-ss perform this task greatly influences its performance. This thesis explores how different peer selection algorithms affect the performance of such systems. A framework for doing the comparisons of peer selection algorithms is built on top of the network simulator ns2, making it possible to later extend the simulations with new peer selection algorithms, congestion control algorithms, wireless networks, cross traffic and other. However, ns2 is a low-level simulator, hence limiting the number of peers in the simulations, because CPU-resources are limited. The simulations are limited to single-layered streams. We find that a centralized selection method, which utilizes knowledge of bandwidth capacities and routing in the network, greatly outperforms both simple random selection of peers, and selection of close peers. Even though centralized selection does not scale well, and is therefore only applicable for a limited number of peers, this shows there is much room for improvement over basic strategies

Group-based reduction schemes for streaming applications

Some peer-to-peer streaming systems make use of linear codes to reduce the rate of the data uploaded by peers with limited upload capabilities. Such "data reduction" techniques are based on a vector-space approach and produce the data to be uploaded by means of linear combinations of the content data in a suitable finite field. In this paper, we propose a more general approach based on group theory. The new approach, while including the vector space approach as a special case, allows to design schemes that cannot be modeled as linear codes. We analyze the properties of the schemes based on the new approach, showing also how a group-based scheme can be used to prevent stream poisoning and how a group-based scheme can be converted into a secret-sharing scheme. Examples of group-based schemes that cannot be described in the vector-space framework are also shown

Access-Network Association Policies for Media Streaming in Heterogeneous Environments

We study the design of media streaming applications in the presence of multiple heterogeneous wireless access methods with different throughputs and costs. Our objective is to analytically characterize the trade-off between the usage cost and the Quality of user Experience (QoE), which is represented by the probability of interruption in media playback and the initial waiting time. We model each access network as a server that provides packets to the user according to a Poisson process with a certain rate and cost. Blocks are coded using random linear codes to alleviate the duplicate packet reception problem. Users must take decisions on how many packets to buffer before playout, and which networks to access during playout. We design, analyze and compare several control policies with a threshold structure. We formulate the problem of finding the optimal control policy as an MDP with a probabilistic constraint. We present the HJB equation for this problem by expanding the state space, and exploit it as a verification method for optimality of the proposed control law.Comment: submitted to CDC 201

Peer-to-peer multimedia communication

I sistemi Peer-to-Peer (P2P) sono stati inventi, messi in campo e studiati da più di dieci anni, andando al di là della semplice applicazione per scambio di file. Nelle reti P2P i partecipanti si organizzano in una rete "overlay" che è astratta rispetto alle caratteristiche della sottostante rete fisica. Scopo di questi sistemi è la distribuzione di risorse quali contenuti, spazio di memorizzazione o cicli macchina. Gli utenti quindi giocano un ruolo attivo e possono essere considerati come sia clienti che serventi allo stesso tempo per il particolare servizio che la rete P2P offre. Lo scopo di questa tesi di dottorato è lo studio di questi sistemi ed il dare un contributo nella loro analisi prestazionale. L'analisi mira a valutare le prestazioni raggiunte dai sistemi e/o i limiti teorici raggiungibili. Infatti, nonostante esistano diversi meccanismi per il peer-to-peer streaming, l'analisi prestazionale di questo tipo di sistemi può essere considerata ancora nella sua infanzia. A questo scopo, i contributi principali di questa tesi di dottorato sono: i)la derivazione di un limite teorico per il ritardo nei sistemi di P2P streaming, ii) la creazione di un algoritmo che sfrutti le conoscenze acquisite attraverso il lavoro teorico, iii) l'analisi prestazionale dell'algoritmo utilizzando un simulatore espressamente progettato per riprodurre le caratteristiche delle reti P2P reali composte da centinaia di migliaia di nodi che si connettono e disconnettono in continuazione.Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have been invented, deployed and researched for more than ten years and went far beyond the simple file sharing applications. In P2P networks, participants organize themselves in an overlay network that abstracts from the topological characteristics of the underlying physical network. Aim of these systems is the distribution of some kind of resources like contents, storage, or CPU cycles. Users, therefore, play an active role so that they can be considered as client and server at the same time, for the particular service that is provided through the P2P paradigm. Goal of this dissertation thesis is to study these systems, and give contributes in their performance evaluation. The analysis will aim to evaluate the achieved performance of a system and/or the performance bounds that could be achievable. In fact, even if there are several proposals of different systems, peer-to-peer streaming performance analysis can be considered still in its infancy and there is still a lot of work to do. To this aim, the main contributes of this dissertation thesis are i) the derivation of a theoretical delay bounds for P2P streaming system ii) II the creation of an algorithm that exploits the new insights that come out from the theoretical study iii) the performance evaluation of this algorithm using an ad-hoc simulator, expressly tailored to reproduce the characteristics of the real-world P2P streaming systems, composed by hundred thousands of intermittently connected users

VOD STREAMING WITH A NETWORK CODING EQUIVALENT CONTENT DISTRIBUTION SCHEME

Although random access operations are desirable for on-demand video streaming in peer-to-peer systems, they are difficult to efficiently achieve due to the asynchronous interactive behaviors of users and the dynamic nature of peers. In this paper, we propose a network coding equivalent content distribution (NCECD) scheme to efficiently handle interactive videoon- demand (VoD) operations in peer-to-peer systems. In NCECD, videos are divided into segments that are then further divided into blocks. These blocks are encoded into independent blocks that are distributed to different peers for local storage. With NCECD, a new client only needs to connect to a sufficient number of parent peers to be able to view the whole video and rarely needs to find new parents when performing random access operations. In most existing methods, a new client must search for parent peers containing specific segments; however, NCECD uses the properties of network coding to cache equivalent content in peers, so that one can pick any parent without additional searches. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves low startup and jump searching delays and requires fewer server resources. In addition, we present the analysis of system parameters to achieve reasonable block loss rates for the proposed scheme

Scalable Peer-to-Peer Streaming for Live Entertainment Content

We present a system for streaming live entertainment content over the Internet originating from a single source to a scalable number of consumers without resorting to centralized or provider-provisioned resources. The system creates a peer-to-peer overlay network, which attempts to optimize use of existing capacity to ensure quality of service, delivering low startup delay and lag in playout of the live content. There are three main aspects of our solution: first, a swarming mechanism that constructs an overlay topology for minimizing propagation delays from the source to end consumers; second, a distributed overlay anycast system that uses a location-based search algorithm for peers to quickly find the closest peers in a given stream; and finally, a novel incentive mechanism that encourages peers to donate capacity even when the user is not actively consuming content

Avoiding Interruptions - QoE Trade-offs in Block-coded Streaming Media Applications

We take an analytical approach to study Quality of user Experience (QoE) for video streaming applications. First, we show that random linear network coding applied to blocks of video frames can significantly simplify the packet requests at the network layer and save resources by avoiding duplicate packet reception. Network coding allows us to model the receiver's buffer as a queue with Poisson arrivals and deterministic departures. We consider the probability of interruption in video playback as well as the number of initially buffered packets (initial waiting time) as the QoE metrics. We characterize the optimal trade-off between these metrics by providing upper and lower bounds on the minimum initial buffer size, required to achieve certain level of interruption probability for different regimes of the system parameters. Our bounds are asymptotically tight as the file size goes to infinity.Comment: Submitted to ISIT 2010 - Full versio