Managing Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming Applications

Abstract

Abstract. A number of p2p live streaming systems [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] and [7] have been proposed in recent years. Typically, the description of these systems focuses on how the live stream is transmitted from its source to a number of viewers within the particular p2p network and how these systems deal with the failure of one or more viewers during transmission of the stream. An important aspect of each of these systems that is typically overlooked is how individual stream transmitters and viewers of these streams are managed in terms of registration, configuration and maintenance. In this paper, a set of management related abstractions common to many p2p live streaming systems are identified. This paper describes the MeshTV architecture, capturing these abstractions, to simplify the management of p2p live streaming applications. The architecture has been evaluated through a number of experiments and has been assessed against existing related work.

Multimedia Streaming

“…In this kind of application, the source splits the content into small blocks, termed chunks, that are transmitted to each end-user in parallel. In this scenario, an uniform distribution of chunks is critical, as the chunk selection strategy has to take into account the play-out deadline of chunks as well [186] and an even larger benefit is to be expected by enabling network coding. Since in some architectures the source still distinguish itself for reliability and resources made available to the service, some prefer using the term cooperative rather than Peer-to-Peer, in the sense that the users are not considered peers, but clients that cooperate in order to alleviate the load of the sever [181].…”