Load Balancing in P2P Video Streaming Systems with Service Differentiation

Abstract

This paper considers Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video streaming systems with service differentiation, in which the quality level of a video stream is differentiated according to the authority level of the subscribers. In such P2P video streaming systems, peers with high authority level are imposed a heavy load, since high quality video generally consumes more upload capacity. To resolve such problem, we encode video stream by using a layered encoding and organize a overlay for each authority level and deliver the appropriate streams by using more capacity of peers with lower authority level. However, in the method, peers with low authority level are imposed a heavy load, so that latency of forwarding stream correspond to low authority is increased. In this paper, we propose a load balancing method for such P2P systems. In our proposed method, by using more capacity of peers with high authority level, streams corresponded to low authority level are forwarded. so that more peers receive streams within less hop. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulation. The result of simulations shows that the latency which peers receive sub-streams with the proposed method is the smallest in all methods.