Understanding the flash crowd in P2P live video streaming systems

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) live video streaming systems have recently received significant attention, with commercial deployment gaining increased popularity in the Internet. It is evident from our experiences with real-world systems that, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of users trying to join a program in the first few minutes of a live broadcast. This phenomenon, unique in live streaming systems, referred to as the flash crowd, poses significant challenges in the system design. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model to capture the inherent relationship between time and scale in P2P streaming systems under the flash crowd. Specifically, we show that there is an upper bound on the system scale with respect to a time constraint. In addition, our analysis has brought forth an in-depth understanding on the effect from the gossip protocol and churn effects.