Dynamic Bandwidth Auctions in Multioverlay P2P Streaming with Network Coding

Abstract

In peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming applications such as IPTV, it is natural to accommodate multiple coexisting streaming overlays, corresponding to channels of programming. In the case of multiple overlays, it is a challenging task to design an appropriate bandwidth allocation protocol, such that these overlays efficiently share the available upload bandwidth on peers, media content is efficiently distributed to achieve the required streaming rate, as well as the streaming costs are minimized. In this paper, we seek to design simple, effective, and decentralized strategies to resolve conflicts among coexisting streaming overlays in their bandwidth competition and combine such strategies with network-coding-based media distribution to achieve efficient multioverlay streaming. Since such strategies of conflict are game theoretic in nature, we characterize them as a decentralized collection of dynamic auction games, in which downstream peers bid for upload bandwidth at the upstream peers for the delivery of coded media blocks. With extensive theoretical analysis and performance evaluation, we show that these local games converge to an optimal topology for each overlay in realistic asynchronous environments. Together with network-coding-based media dissemination, these streaming overlays adapt to peer dynamics, fairly share peer upload bandwidth to achieve satisfactory streaming rates, and can be prioritized.