Live Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming

Sagar Patel and Diganta Goswami

{p.sagar, dgoswami}@iitg.ernet.in
Department of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam.

Abstract
This report presents the study of several
network architectures for Peer-to-Peer
Live media streaming and the issues
faced while practically constructing the
same. The challenge in designing P2P
live media streaming networks is to
overcome very strict time constraints on
delivery time of data blocks from source
to destination peers, thus requires more
efficient and robust architectures. All the
protocols we study or propose should
satisfy the following inequality at all
times
:
Introduction
Rate of consumption at source <= rate
We
want toat solve
of production
source.the problem of
streaming Live media, over internet, to a
large number of clients.
First solution we came up with
established individual connection from
source to all destination nodes.
The above method failed when number
of users increase because it puts huge
load on source.
Next solution proposed was to use IP
multicast.
Though theoretically best available
method at that time, it was not accepted
because of the complexity concerns over
its practical deployment.
Then a technique called Chaining was
developed.
This protocol builds a tree from source to
all the receivers generating many levels
in the networks. It's advantage was that
nodes at lower level could get packets
Network
Architectures
from the
intermediate nodes thus
alleviating
some
pressure
The
objective
of this
paperfrom
is tosource.
study
This technique
exponentially
different
overlaygrew
architectures
usedand
in
today
itsmedia
called streaming.
Peer-to-PeerArchitectures
protocol.
P2P
live
are mainly od two types : Tree based
and Mesh based. Tree based ones
have single path from source to any peer
while Mesh based ones are built in the
form of undirected complete graph,
there exists links between any two
peers, other then the source generating
peer.

Tree-based Logical
Topology

Mesh-based Logical
Topology

It adopts swarm-like design where a peer

periodically exchange data availability
information with neighbor peers.
Mesh networks are more robust and
resilient to peer dynamics.
Clustered
Mesh
networks
and
Unstructured Mesh networks.

Architectures based on Single tree

Architecture Construction

In this protocol, a multicast tree is built

at the application layer. Source forwards
the packets to all its childrens which in
turn does the same.
End-to-end delay from source to
destination is a critical metric and it
depends on the height of the multicast
tree. Thus one major design goal is the
shorten the end-to-end delay by
reducing the height of multicast tree.
Shortcomings:
Maximum data rate that can be
delivered to a peer depends on the
minimum link capacity encountered on a
path from source to destination.
Multi-trees
based
Architectures
Constructed trees does not utilize upload
Constructs
multiple
independent
capacity of individual peers.
multicast trees, one for each substream.
A peer improves its media quality by
joining many multicast trees. Departure
of one ancestor in a multicast tree does
not severely degrade the media quality
of a peer.
Our main design goal is to alleviate the
dependency on source peers and
distributing the overall load of the
network
appropriately
among
participating peers. Two ways to
implement it :
Construct diverse and bushy trees.
Architectures based on Mesh
Assign greater number of neighbors to a
Quite
to load
multi-tree
based
peer if itsimilar
has higher
then the others.
architecture.
The
is, here the
Drawback
is difference
its
complicated
packets
delivery may take different paths
architecture.
during different times based on network
and peer dynamics.

There are several challenges we face

while
constructing
the
overlay
architectures for live media streaming.
Here we discuss 3 most common ones :
1) How to efficiently find peers in the
network?
2) Selection of suitable peers,
3) Replacement of a Peer with a new
one.
Peer
Discovery
One issue is where would an incoming
peer join in the existing network. How
will the new node know about the current
peers in network.
Peers require the information like : all
active peers in network, their bandwidth
usages and current workload. Two
general peer discovery methods : one
maintains the global peer information
and the other keeps only the information
Peer
aboutSelection
small number of peers.
Here the issue is to select appropriate
peers as neighbors so as to optimize
overall
packet
delay
in
network,
minimize streaming rate at a particular
node and to achieve optimal resilience.
Peer selection based on delay and
bandwidth achieve good performance if
network and peer conditions do not
change. However in practice it is not so.
Therefore
some
protocol
randomly
selects parent peers with the purpose of
Peer
Replacement
proving more diverse paths and diverse
Here
the issue is to select an alternative
parents
peer for the peer which is leaving the
network.
Two approaches studied : Reactive and
Proactive

In Reactive approach, new parent is

assigned to each child of the missing
peer and the decision on how to do it is
taken at that time.
In Proactive approach, the restoration
plans are carried out beforehand.
Reactive approach consumes lot of time,
therefore
Proactive
approach
id
Conclusion
preferred.
In this report we studies different overlay
architectures used for live P2P media
streaming, their good features and
drawbacks. We studied P2P networks
from the perspective of both logical
construction
as
well
as
efficient
practical construction. We judged the
efficiency of P2P networks on the
following metrics: handling peer and
network dynamics, bandwidth efficiency,
construction complexity. Finally we
concluded that mesh based architecture
is more efficient then tree based but
adds more complexity to the networks.
we also showed that for very large
Plan
for Next
Semester hybrid networks
networks
tree-mesh
are
the
most
efficient.
My plan for the next semester is

to find an efficient solution to the

problems discussed above and to
work on the tree-mesh hybrid
model and try to propose a
model with a view on streaming
live media on our campus
intranet. Then implementing the
proposed model for practical use
References
would be the final step.
[1] M. Bawa H. Deshpande and H. Garcia-Molina. Streaming live media
over a peer-to-peer network. pages 117, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 2002.ACM
SIGCOMM.
[2] Byrav Ramamurthy Jagannath Ghoshal, Lisong Xu and Miao Wang.
Network architectures for live peer-to-peer media streaming. pages 18.
[3] A-M. Kermarrec A. Nandi A. Rowstron M. Castro, P. Druschel and A.
Singh. Splitstream: High-bandwidth multicast in a cooperative
environment. pages 12831292, Lake Bolton,New York, USA, 2003.
SOSP03.
[4] N. Magharei and R. Rejaie. Prime: peer-topeer receiver-driven
meshbased streaming. pages 12831292, Alaska, USA, 2007. IEEE
INFOCOM.
[5] Bobby Bhattacharjee S. Banerjee and C. Kommareddy. Scalable
application layer multicast. pages 12831292, Pittsburgh, PA, USA,
2002.ACM SIGCOMM.