Global 1-Mbps Peer-Assisted Streaming: Fine-Grain Measurement of a Configurable Platform

Abstract

Abstract-High-resolution video is defining a new age of peer-assisted video streaming over the public Internet. Streaming over 1-Mbps videos in a scalable and global manner presents a challenging milestone. In this work, we examine the feasibility of 1-Mbps streaming through a global measurement study. In contrast to previous measurement studies that crawl commercial applications, we conduct fine-grain, controlled experiments on a configurable platform. We developed and deployed FastMesh-SIM, a novel peer-assisted streaming system that leverages proxies, scalable streaming trees and IP multicast to achieve 1-Mbps streaming at a global scale.With the configurability-enabled design, we are allowed to conduct controlled experiments by varying design decisions under a wide range of operating conditions, and measuring in-depth, finegrain metrics at a per-hop, per-segment level. We collected hundreds of hours of streaming traces that broadcast live TV channels to more than 120 peers and 30 proxies, with a global geographic footprint over 8 different countries. Data analysis demonstrates how a set of design decisions collectively overcome the 1-Mbps barrier. The various operational issues we uncovered provide insights to service providers that want to deploy a commercial system at a larger scale and a higher streaming rate. By comparing theory and practice, we also confirm theory-inspired architectural decisions, and show that our system indeed achieves throughputs close to theoretical upper-bound calculated under many ideal assumptions.

Beyond 1Mbps Global Overlay Live Streaming

“…There have been many experimental studies on P2P or overlay streaming [Jiang et al 2012;Alessandria et al 2009;Yin et al 2009;Wu et al 2011;Vu et al 2010]. The experiments are often conducted on some commercially deployed systems, for instance, PPLive, UUSee, Zattoo, etc.…”

“…In our previous work [Jiang et al 2012], we explore the performance of a Proxy-P2P system under various configurable settings, that is, tree-depth, IP-multicast, churns, etc. However, helpers have not been investigated, We study the impact of helpers in global streaming, and the feasibility of multi-Mbps live streaming.…”

“…In order to stream multi-Mbps globally, we explore the multipath effect that helpers provide, and how it can increase the streaming rate and reduce the playback delay. We have employ different design principles, software implementation and experiment settings from Jiang et al [2012]. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first piece of experimental work exploring the feasibility of a helper-assisted push-based live streaming network with multi-Mbps streaming rate.…”