Enhancing P2P live streaming performance by balancing description distribution and available forwarding bandwidth in P2P streaming network

In a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, peers not only receive services from the network, but also contribute their own resources to the network. The abundant resources brought by P2P networks have stimulated the wide deployment of resource-consuming multimedia streaming services over a P2P architecture. Allowing for the heterogeneity of peers in their upload and download bandwidth, most researches adopt the Multiple Description Coding (MDC) technique to enable differentiated streaming services. However, due to the lack of a global view of description availability, they tend to cause the skewed distribution of descriptions and lead to the under-utilization of aggregated resources on P2P networks. In the paper, we propose a novel approach to balance the distribution of descriptions and available upload bandwidth in the P2P live streaming network. Based on the description distribution and available upload bandwidth, the proposed balancing scheme determines what descriptions a new peer should receive and their source peers such that better system scalability can be achieved. The simulation experiments indicate that our proposed balancing scheme can effectively reduce the server bandwidth consumption and rejection rate. Furthermore, abandoned peers can recover their lost descriptions mostly from the existing peers in the network instead of the server. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.