rStream: Resilient and optimal peer-to-peer streaming with rateless codes

Due to the lack of stability and reliability in peer-to-peer networks, multimedia streaming over peer-to-peer networks represents several fundamental engineering challenges. First, multimedia streaming sessions need to be resilient to volatile network dynamics and node departures that are characteristic in peer-to-peer networks. Second, they need to take full advantage of the existing bandwidth capacities by minimizing the delivery of redundant content and the need for content reconciliation among peers during streaming. Finally, streaming peers need to be optimally selected to construct high-quality streaming topologies so that end-to-end latencies are taken into consideration. The original contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we propose to use a recent coding technique, referred to as rateless codes, to code the multimedia bitstreams before they are transmitted over peer-to-peer links. The use of rateless codes eliminates the requirements of content reconciliation, as well as the risks of delivering redundant content over the network. Rateless codes also help the streaming sessions to adapt to volatile network dynamics. Second, we minimize end-to-end latencies in streaming sessions by optimizing toward a latency-related objective in a linear optimization problem, the solution to which can be efficiently derived in a decentralized and iterative fashion. The validity and effectiveness of our new contributions are demonstrated in extensive experiments in emulated realistic peer-to-peer environments with our rStream implementation.