A super-peer based P2P live media streaming system

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. While traditional P2P file distribution applications target elastic data transfers, P2P streaming focuses on the efficient delivery of audio and video content under tight timing requirements. In these applications, each node independently selects some other nodes as its neighbors and exchanges streaming data with neighbors. 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. Furthermore, with the implementation of two-layer based overlay network that consists of super-peers and ordinary peers, PALMS-SP leverages on the heterogeneity of bandwidths and shows better Quality of Service (QoS). We have extensively evaluated the performance of PALMS-SP. Our experiments demonstrate that PALMS-SP achieves good streaming quality with the existence of super-peers.