Achieving maximum throughput and minimum delay in heterogeneous Peer-to-Peer streaming networks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming network with two types of peers: regular peers that can contribute one unit of upload bandwidth and selfish peers that cannot contribute any upload bandwidth. This model captures a practical scenario where real-time video is needed to broadcast not only to computers connected through high-speed Internet but also to mobile devices with limited and expensive upload bandwidth. The objective is to maximize the streaming rate guaranteed to each regular or selfish peer and minimize the delay for this content to be distributed to all peers. Using random Hamiltonian cycles, we propose a P2P streaming algorithm that can achieve (1 − 1/K)2 of the optimal streaming rate and O(logN) streaming delay for any fixed constant K > 2, where N denotes the number of peers in the network.