Distributing streaming media content using cooperative networking

2010

In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-assisted streaming have emerged as promising models for low-cost multimedia distribution to large scale user communities. In this paper, we study streaming of scalable video streams over these systems. Scalable video streams are composed of multiple layers and can easily be adapted according to the characteristics and needs of receivers. Thus, they can efficiently support a wide spectrum of heterogeneous peers participating in a P2P streaming system. We present an analytical model for forecasting the long-term behavior of a P2P streaming system with scalable video streams. Our analysis takes as inputs the characteristics of a dynamic P2P streaming system and the video streams. It then analytically computes the expected throughput of the streaming system and the expected video quality delivered to peers. The analysis also provides an upper bound on the maximum number of peers that can be admitted to the system at once (i.e., in flash crowd scenarios), while ensuring a certain video quality. We present a general analysis framework that can be customized to various practical P2P streaming systems with different characteristics. Then, we show the detailed analysis of a typical P2P streaming system and we explain how other systems can be analyzed using our model. We validate our analysis by comparing its results to those obtained from simulations, which confirm the accuracy of our analysis. Our analysis and simulations enable administrators of P2P streaming systems to predict the throughput and the video quality that can be delivered to users.

Peer-to-peer networks are strongly based on cooperation. The users, called peers, communicate basically in a three-level based policy. In the first one, peers discover others interested in the same content, and is called swarm selection strategy (or swarming). Then, peers must select the best ones to cooperate, what is called peer selection strategy. Finally, peers cooperate sending pieces to each other, and the planning must attend the piece selection strategy. In this paper we propose an extension of a simple model based on cooperation for peer-to-peer video streaming networks. We assume that the swarming classifies peers according to their bandwidth. In this model we meet both the peer and the piece selection strategies, for simplified scenarios. The aim is to design network policies in order to achieve the highest continuity of video reproduction when peers reach a stationary state. We show that under full knowledge, the network can scale even under free-riding effects. At the same time, we provide theoretical results that reveal Rarest First has a poor performance in comparison with other techniques. Finally, we analyze the scalability in a worst-case scenario when a variable amount of special peers are included in the network.

Computer Communications and Networks, 2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

A peer-to-peer model is very useful in solving the server link bottleneck problem of a client-server model. In this work, we discuss the problems of distributing multimedia content over peer-to-peer network. We focus on two problems in peer-to-peer media content distribution systems. The first is the transmission scheduling of the media data for a multi-source streaming session. We present a sophisticated scheduling scheme, which results in minimum buffering delay. The second problem is on the fast distribution of media content in the peer-to-peer system that is self-growing. We propose a mechanism accelerating the speed at which the system's streaming capacity increases.

2003

With the growth of computing power and the proliferation of broadband access to the Internet, media streaming has widely diffused. Although the proxy caching technique is one method to accomplish effective media streaming, it cannot adapt to the variations of user locations and diverse user demands. By using the P2P communication architecture, media streaming can be expected to smoothly react to network conditions and changes in user demands for media-streams. In this paper, we propose efficient methods to achieve continuous and scalable media streaming system. In our mechanisms, a media stream is divided into blocks for efficient use of network bandwidth and storage space. We propose two scalable search methods and two algorithms to determine an optimum provider peer from search results. Through several simulation experiments, we show that the FLS method can perform continuous media play-out while reducing the amount of search traffic to 1/6 compared with full flooding.

Proceedings 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 2002

In this paper, we study a peer-to-peer media streaming system with the following characteristics: (1) its streaming capacity grows dynamically; (2) peers do not exhibit serverlike behavior; (3) peers are heterogeneous in their bandwidth contribution; and (4) each streaming session may involve multiple supplying peers. Based on these characteristics, we investigate two problems: (1) how to assign media data to multiple supplying peers in one streaming session and (2) how to fast amplify the system's total streaming capacity. Our solution to the first problem is an optimal media data assignment algorithm

Wireless Community Networks (WCNs) are bottom-up broadband networks empowering people with their on-line communication means. Too often, however, services tailored for their characteristics are missing, with the consequence that they have worse performance than what they could. We present here an adaptation of an Open Source P2P live streaming platform that works efficiently, and with good application-level quality, over WCNs. WCNs links are usually symmetric, or at least asymmetry is not by design as it is in ADSL, and a WCN topology is local and normally flat (contrary to the the global Internet), so that the P2P overlay used for video distribution can be adapted to the underlaying network characteristics. We exploit this observation to derive over- lay building strategies that make use of cross-layer information to reduce the impact of the P2P streaming on the WCN while maintaining good application performance. We experiment with a real application in real WCN nodes, both in the Community-Lab provided by the CONFINE EU Project and within an emulation framework based on Mininet, where we can build larger topologies and interact more efficiently with the mesh underlay, which is unfortunately not accessible in Community-Lab. The results show that, with the overlay building strategies proposed, the P2P streaming applications can reduce the load on the WCN to about one half, also equalizing the load on links. At the same time the delivery rate and delay of video chunks are practically unaffected.

Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Peer-to-peer streaming and IP-TV - P2P-TV '07, 2007

We introduce the notions of production and saturation time for peer-to-peer real-time video-streaming networks. Due to the fact that video-streaming is divided into small blocks to transmit, production, adopted from economics, is defined as the number of users that have obtained video block m by time t. Saturation time refers to the time when the system leaves the state where there have been more users requesting block m than the number of users that the system could have supplied. Based on those two notions, we provide a lower bound on the achievable production functions. Simulation results are provided for a heuristic protocol which appears to confirm the lower bound in terms of production and saturation time. The analysis results have also been confirmed by simulation using a stochastic model.

2012

We analyze a peer-assisted Video-on-Demand system in which users contribute their upload bandwidth to the redistribution of a video that they are downloading or that they have cached locally. Our target is to characterize the additional bandwidth that servers must supply to immediately satisfy all requests to watch a given video. We develop an approximate fluid model to compute the required server bandwidth in the sequential delivery case, as well as in controlled Bit-Torrent like swarms. Our approach is able to capture several stochastic effects related to peer churn, upload bandwidth heterogeneity, nonstationary traffic conditions, which have not been documented or analyzed before. We provide an analytical methodology to design efficient peer-assisted VoD systems and optimal resource allocation strategies under server capacity constraints.

IEEE Communications Magazine, 2008

Proceedings of The IEEE, 2004

Streaming media on the Internet has experienced rapid growth over the last few years and will continue to increase in importance as broadband technologies and authoring tools continue to improve. As the Internet becomes an increasingly popular alternative to traditional communications media, Internet streaming will become a significant component of many content providers' communications strategies. Internet streaming, however, poses significant challenges for content providers, since it has significant distribution problems. Scalability, quality, reliability, and cost are all issues that have to be addressed in a successful streaming media offering. Streaming content delivery networks (streaming CDNs) attempt to provide solutions to the bottlenecks encountered by streaming applications on the Internet. However, only a small number of them has been deployed, and little is known about the internal organization of these systems. In this paper, we discuss the design choices made during the evolution of Akamai's CDN for streaming media. In particular, we look at the design choices made to ensure the network's scalability, quality of delivered content, and reliability while keeping costs low. Performance studies conducted on the evolving system indicate that our design scores highly on all of the above categories.

Multimedia Systems, 2005

We presellt the design. implementation. and evulmllion of a novel P2P service called Cof!c'rrCasr. Cul-Jcl',CaS[ ()rCra(e.~cllIire!)' :It the application level but infers amI exploits propenies of the um.lcrlying network,

In this paper, we investigate the use of cooperative transmission strategies to support timely and efficient delivery of on-demand content to end users. Within the proposed framework, a cooperative transmission strategy suggests that users who have access to the requested content cooperatively transmit to the targeted user(s) to minimize the servicing requirements at the server side and to improve the scalability performance in the network. Through extensive simulation-based studies, we show that significant performance improvements can be achieved with the proposed framework to enable efficient access to an ever growing on-demand content.

2006

Multimedia contents are distributed to peers in various ways in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. A peer which holds a content, even a part of a content can provide other peers with the content. Multimedia streaming is more significant in multimedia applications than downloading ways in Internet applications. We discuss how to support peers with multimedia streaming service by using multiple contents peers. In our distributed multi-source streaming model, a collection of multiple contents peers in parallel transmit packets of a multimedia content to a requesting leaf peer to realize the reliability and scalability without any centralized controller. Even if some peer stops by fault and is degraded in performance and packets are lost and delayed in networks, a requesting leaf peer receives every data of a content at the required rate. We discuss a pair of flooding-based protocols, distributed and tree-based coordination protocols DCoP and TCoP, to synchronize multiple contents peers to reliably and efficiently deliver packets to a requesting peer. A peer can be redundantly selected by multiple peers in DCoP but it taken by at most one peer in TCoP. We evaluate the protocols in terms of how long it takes and how many messages are transmitted to synchronize multiple contents peers.

Proceedings of the IEEE/LEOS 3rd International Conference on Numerical Simulation of Semiconductor Optoelectronic Devices (IEEE Cat. No.03EX726)

Distribution of streaming media content, including live news, music and videos, is becoming increasingly popular in today's Internet. Traditional client/server architectures are inefficient for distributing streaming media objects because of the high demands for system resources, especially server and network bandwidth, which severely limit the total number of simultaneous users the system can support. One proposal for improving the scalability of media distribution systems is the use of P2P overlay networks. Although a number of previous work has evaluated different aspects of P2P systems, mainly through simulation, there is a lack of a thorough quantitative analysis of the requirements for server and network resources (i.e., CPU, server and network bandwidth) in actual P2P systems, compared to traditional client/server systems. This work aims at filling this gap by providing experimental results that quantify the savings in server and network resources if a P2P approach is used for distributing live streaming media instead of the traditional client/server approach. Towards this goal, we build an experimental testbed, in a controlled environment, to evaluate actual systems with varying number of clients during periods when the distribution tree is static. A key component of this experimental testbed is a new efficient and scalable application called streaming servent, which can act both as a client and a server, forwarding packets to other clients. We also use simple analytical formulas to evaluate the scalability of our servent application. The experimental results quantify the intuitive better scalability of the P2P architecture. As an example, the total server bandwidth decreases from 15 Mbits/s to 9 Mbits/s (a 40% reduction) if a P2P architecture is used instead of a client/server architecture for live delivery of a given file to 24 clients.