Resilient P2P streaming

Abstract

P2P streaming has shown an alternative way of broadcasting media to the end users. It is theoretically more scalable than its client-server based counterpart but suffers from other issues arising from the dynamic nature of the system. This is built on top of the internet by forming an overlay network. End-users (peers) are the main sources of the overlay network, sharing their bandwidth, storage and memory. Peers join and leave freely, which dramatically affects, both on QoS and QoE. Furthermore, the interconnections among the peers are based on logical overlays, which are not harmonized with the physical underlay infrastructure. This article presents combinations of different techniques, namely stream redundancy, multi-source streaming and locality-awareness (network efficiency), in the context of live and video-on-demand broadcasting. A new technique is introduced to improve P2P performance and assess it via a comparative, simulation-based study. It is found that redundancy affects network utilization only marginally if traffic is kept at the edges via localization techniques; multisource streaming improves throughput, delay, and minimizing the streaming time. Keywords: P2P; Multimedia; Redundancy; Multi-source; Locality-awarenes