On Reducing Mesh Delay for Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming

Abstract

Abstract-Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has emerged as a promising scalable solution for live streaming to large group. In this paper, we address the design of overlay which achieves low source-to-peer delay, is robust to user churn, accommodates of asymmetric and diverse uplink bandwidth, and continuously improves based on existing user pool. A natural choice is the use of mesh, where each peer is served by multiple parents. Since the peer delay in a mesh depends on its longest path through its parents, we study how to optimize such delay while meeting a certain streaming rate requirement.We first formulate the minimum delay mesh problem and show that it is NP-hard. Then we propose a centralized heuristic based on complete knowledge which serves as our benchmark and optimal solution for all the other schemes under comparison. Our heuristic makes use of the concept of power in network given by the ratio of throughput and delay. By maximizing the network power, our heuristic achieves very low delay. We then propose a simple distributed algorithm where peers select their parents based on the power concept. The algorithm makes continuous improvement on delay until some minimum delay is reached. Simulation results show that our distributed protocol performs close to the centralized one, and substantially outperforms traditional and state-of-the-art approaches.

Overlay live video streaming with heterogeneous bitrate requirements

“…To address the weaknesses of single-tree structure, using forest of multiple trees (or a push-based mesh) was proposed [14][15][16]. Multiple interior node-disjoint trees are constructed to mitigate single parent failure.…”

“…Therefore, TSP is polynomial reducible to MDRT. The complexity of a similar problem is proved to be NPHard in [15]. h…”

“…Obviously those high-bandwidth nodes close to the server should be connected to the server with higher priority. To balance between the bandwidth and distance, the score of node i is calculated as u i =d si (this has been shown to be effective from [15]). Nodes with the highest scores become the children of s and hence are added to all the trees to get the streams.…”

A hybrid Content Distribution Model for fast data dissemination in overlay networks

“…These approaches have been reviewed in [1]. A viable scheduler can reduce the completion time and provide efficient utilization of peers' resources such as local storage and network bandwidth [8,9,10,11]. However, in a large heterogeneous overlay network it is very difficult to find an optimal chunk propagation scheme that minimizes the client download time.…”

On the source switching problem of Peer-to-Peer streaming

“…• Reducing the minimum longest path: Ren et al study how to optimize the source-to-end delay while meeting a certain streaming rate requirement from the fact that the peer delay in a mesh depends on its longest path through its parents to the source [22]. They formulate the minimum delay mesh problem which is NP-hard and propose a distributed algorithm which makes continuous improvement on delay until some minimum delay is reached.…”