A new hybrid approach for overlay construction in P2P live streaming

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a decentralized communications model which was originally used for file sharing, and more recently for real-time communications and media streaming. Due to the utilization of resources, demand of peer to peer network is increasing rapidly and today significant part of the Internet traffic is generated by peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. Live video streaming in peer to peer network has two main issues- overlay construction and data scheduling. In this paper we first briefly discussed about existing overlay architectures in live streaming P2P network e.g. tree architecture and mesh architecture and compared their advantages, disadvantages and other relevant concepts and then suggested novel hybrid tree/mesh design that leverages both overlays. Tree approach is good for peer to peer network in terms of latency and resource utilization but it is quite complex when the devices are mobile in nature. While in mesh architecture resilience and resource utilization is maximum but has problem of latency and control overhead. Our new hybrid tree/mesh design provides better resources utilization and less delay between peers as compare to previous approaches.