A DHT-Aided Chunk-Driven Overlay for Scalable and Efficient Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming

Abstract

Internet-based video streaming applications is becoming more and more popular and attract millions of online viewers every day. The incredible growth of viewers, dynamics of participants, and high video quality-of-service (QoS) requirement pose scalability, availability and low-latency challenges to peer-to-peer (P2P) live video streaming systems. Tree-based systems have low-delay but are vulnerable to churn, while mesh-based systems are churn-resilient but suffers high delay and overhead. Both systems cannot make full utilization of the bandwidth in the system. To tackle the challenges, we propose a DHT-aided Chunk-driven Overlay (DCO). It introduces a scalable DHT ring structure into a mesh-based overlay to efficiently manage video stream sharing. DCO includes a hierarchical DHT-based infrastructure and a chunk sharing algorithm. Aided by DHT, DCO guarantees stream chunk availability. In this way, DCO flexibly takes full advantage of available bandwidth in the system and at the same time provides high scalability and low-latency. Simulation results show the superiority of DCO compared with mesh-based and tree-based systems.