Improving playback quality of peer-to-peer live streaming systems by joint scheduling and distributed Hash table based compensation

Abstract

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming systems, video data may be lost since peers can join and leave the overlay network randomly, thereby deteriorating the video playback quality. In this paper we propose a new hybrid mesh and Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based P2P streaming system, called HQMedia, to provide high playback quality to users by maintaining high data dissemination resilience with a low overhead. In HQMedia, peers are classified into Super Peers (SP) and Common Peers (CP) according to their online time. SPs and CPs form a mesh structure, while SPs alone form a new Streaming DHT (SDHT) structure. In this hybrid architecture, we propose a joint scheduling and compensation mechanism. If any frames cannot be obtained during the scheduling phase, an SDHT-based compensation mechanism is invoked for retrieving the missing frames near the playback point. We evaluate the performance of HQMedia by both theoretical analysis and intensive simulation experiments on large-scale networks to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed system. Numerical results show that HQMedia significantly outperforms existing mesh-based and treebased P2P live streaming systems by improving playback quality with only less than 1% extra maintenance overhead.