Fast-mesh : a low-delay high-bandwidth mesh for peer-to-peer live streaming

Abstract

Abstract-Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has emerged as a promising scalable solution for live streaming to a large group. In this paper, we address the design of an overlay mesh which achieves low source-to-peer delay, accommodates asymmetric and diverse uplink bandwidth, and continuously improves delay based on an existing pool of peers. By considering a streaming mesh as an aggregation of data flows along multiple spanning trees, the peer delay in the mesh is then its longest delay (including both propagation and scheduling delay) among all the trees. Clearly, such delay can be very high if the mesh is not designed well. In this paper, we propose and study a mesh protocol called Fast-Mesh, which optimizes such delay while meeting a certain streaming bandwidth requirement. Fast-Mesh is particularly suitable for a mildly dynamic network consisting of proxies, supernodes, or content distribution servers.We first formulate the minimum delay multiple trees (MDMT) problem and show that it is NP-hard. Then we propose a centralized heuristic based on complete knowledge, which may be used when the network is small or managed, and serves as an optimal benchmark for all the other schemes under comparison. We then propose a simple distributed algorithm, Fast-Mesh, where peers select their parents based on the concept of power in networks given by the ratio of throughput and delay. By maximizing the network power, our algorithm achieves low delay. The algorithm makes continuous improvement on delay until some minimum delay is reached. Simulation and PlanetLab experiments show that our distributed algorithm performs very well in terms of delay and source workload, and substantially outperforms traditional and state-ofthe-art approaches.

A Secure and Stable Multicast Overlay Network with Load Balancing for Scalable IPTV Services

“…In [16], a low-delay high-bandwidth mesh called FastMesh for peer-to-peer live streaming is proposed. In this work, the authors propose a centralized heuristic with complete mesh knowledge to minimize the maximum delay of all peers in the mesh.…”

Maintaining Tree-Structured P2P Overlay Being Resilient to Simultaneous Leave of Several Peers

“…This motivates the study of tree-structured P2P systems that are resilient to churn, which include those with backup peers [18] and those with a multiple-tree structure [3], [5], [6], [9]. On the other hand, in mesh-structured systems such as CoolSreaming [20], the delivery of a stream is realized by repeating data exchange between adjacent peers [4], [8], [11]- [13]. Since the departure of a peer can easily be recovered by adjacent peers, these mesh-structured systems are more resilient to churn than tree-structured ones, but as a side effect, it causes a high communication overhead and a relatively long delivery delay.…”

Collaborative ISP-CP Live Streaming

“…Another body of work is on topology-aware streaming, where the focus is on network design given underlay topology (see, for examples, [7]). However, they have not addressed how P4P framework can be used in streaming, and how to achieve the trade-off between inter-ISP cost and delay bound in live streaming.…”