Push-Pull Two-Layer Super-Peer based P2P Live Media Streaming

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing has become increasingly popular, accounting for as much as 70% of Internet traffic by some estimates. Recently, we have been witnessing the emergence of a new class of popular P2P applications, namely, P2P audio and video streaming. In this paper, we propose and investigate a full distributed, scalable, and cooperative protocol for live video streaming in an overlay peer-to-peer network. Our protocol, termed P2P Super-Peer based Unstructured Live Media Streaming (PALMS-SP), makes use of combination of push-pull scheduling methods to achieve high performance (in term of delay, stream continuity, cooperation, etc.). The main contribution of PALMS-SP is that it reduces the end-to-end streaming delay and in turn results better delivered quality. We have extensively evaluated the performance of PALMS-SP. Our experiments demonstrate that PALMS-SP with the existence of super-peers achieves better streaming quality in comparison with other existing streaming applications.