Slack time–based scheduling scheme for live video streaming in P2P network

Nowadays, peer‐to‐peer network plays a significant role in data transfer and communication. The past few years have witnessed considerable growth in this area because of its inherent advantages. Peer‐to‐peer live streaming has a significant impact on video transmission over the Internet. Major factors that influence the performance of P2P live streaming are overlay construction and scheduling strategies. Although, a large number of scheduling schemes are developed but none of them is comprehensive enough to provide solutions to live streaming issues. These suffer from substantial delay and low video quality at the receiver side. In this paper, a new start‐up–based selection procedure and slack time–based scheduling scheme is proposed. The start‐up selection procedure defines the start‐up buffer location for new peer, and the scheduling scheme selects both the chunk and peers. The proposed scheduling scheme uses both push and pull priority–based strategies. The simulation results of the proposed approach demonstrates significant improvement in both the network performance and video quality at the receiver side. It is observed that playback delay, startup delay, and end‐to‐end delay in the network are reduced and quality of the video at receiver side is improved as the distortion and frame loss ratio is decreased.     

一种P2P直播系统调度管理方法的设计与实现

P2P网络是自由的网络,在P2P网络中,每个节点（Peer）都是对等的,可以进行信息和服务的自由交换。由于节点具有随机性,采用P2P技术实现流媒体的直播系统时,必须合理地对终端用户节点进行调度管理。针对这一问题,论文设计了一种P2P直播系统的调度管理方法,很好地解决了终端用户节点的调度管理问题,能使用户获取可靠性高、质量好的流媒体服务,对流媒体技术的发展具有一定的指导意义。     

Access control mechanism using flexible multi‐layer structure for mesh‐based P2P live streaming systems

When thousands of new peers seek to join the peer‐to‐peer (P2P) system within a very short time (i.e., the so‐called flash crowd event), most of the peers suffer a long startup delay as a result of peer over‐competition. Accordingly, recent studies have proposed a slot‐based user access control (UAC) mechanism, which periodically admits a certain number of new peers to the system, and a user batch join (UBJ) mechanism, which preconstructs the new peers into a fixed‐size tree structure before peer join process. However, in the UAC mechanism, it is difficult to determine the optimal time slot length; while in the UBJ mechanism, it is difficult to determine the optimal tree size. Accordingly, the present study proposes a structured access control (SAC) mechanism, in which the new‐arriving peers are preconstructed to a flexible multilayer structure to overcome the limitation of a fixed‐size tree structure, and the number of peers in each layer of the structure is determined based on a consideration of the remaining upload bandwidth of the P2P system. Based on the assumption of a heterogeneous upload bandwidth capability of the peers, an analytical model is derived to describe the growth behavior of a P2P system with access control. It is shown that the simulation results for the growth rate of a P2P system based on the SAC mechanism are in good agreement with those obtained from the analytical model. In addition, the simulation results show that the SAC mechanism outperforms the UAC and UBJ mechanisms in terms of a more rapid system growth and a shorter average startup delay. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Server-Aided Adaptive Live Video Streaming Over P2P Networks

Three factors, including churn of peers, high transmission delay, and high bandwidth heterogeneity, jointly bring forward great challenges to video streaming over P2P networks. In this paper, the multi-tree approach is leveraged to construct an overlay with resilience to churn and low transmission delay. For such a multi-tree structured overlay, a server-aided adaptive video streaming scheme is proposed to cope with the bandwidth heterogeneity. During streaming process, video data are collaboratively forwarded to the same receiver by multiple peers based on side information and network condition, as well as the distributed bitstream is dynamically switched among multiple available versions in a rate-distortion optimized way by the streaming server. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves great gain in overall perceived quality over simple heuristic schemes.     

P2P技术原理及应用

对等网络(P2P)有3种主要的组织结构:分布式哈希表(DHT)结构、树形结构、网状结构。P2P技术已经延伸到几乎所有的网络应用领域,如分布式科学计算、文件共享、流媒体直播与点播、语音通信及在线游戏支撑平台等方面。现在人们已经开始将重心转入到覆盖层网络的节点延时聚集研究、覆盖网之间(Inter-Overlay)优化研究、P2P支撑平台研究以及P2P安全研究等方面。     

Adaptive video protection in large scale peer‐to‐peer video streaming over mobile wireless mesh networks

Because video streaming over mobile handheld devices has been of great interest, the necessity of introducing new methods with low implementation cost and scalable infrastructures is a strong demand of the service. In particular, these requirements are present in popular wireless networks such as wireless mesh networks (WMN). Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks promise an efficient scalable network infrastructure for video streaming over wired and wireless networks. Limited resources of the peers in P2P networks and high error rate in wireless channels make it more challenging to run P2P streaming applications over WMNs. Therefore, it is necessary to design efficient and improved error protection methods in P2P video streaming applications over WMNs. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive unequal video protection method specially intended for large scale P2P video streaming over mobile WMNs. Using this method, different frames have different priorities in receivers along the recovery process. Moreover, we precisely and completely evaluate different aspects related to frame protection in these networks using five important performance metrics including video distortion, late arrival distortion, end‐to‐end delay, overhead and initial start‐up delay. The results obtained from a precise simulation in OMNeT++ show that the proposed adaptive method significantly outperforms other solutions by providing better video quality on mobile wireless nodes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Outreach: peer-to-peer topology construction towards minimized server bandwidth costs

On-demand and live multimedia streaming applications (such as Internet TV) are well known to utilize a significant amount of bandwidth from media streaming servers, especially as the number of participating peers in the streaming session scales up. To scale to higher bit rates of media streams and larger numbers of participating peers, overlay tree or mesh topologies are typically constructed, such that peers utilize their available upload capacities to alleviate the excessive bandwidth demands on stream servers. Previous works rely on random selections of upstream peers, without optimizing the topologies towards maximized utilization of peer upload bandwidth, and as a result, minimized bandwidth costs on streaming servers. We propose Outreach, a distributed algorithm to construct overlay topologies among participating peers in streaming sessions. The design objective of Outreach is to optimize the quality of overlay topologies towards scalability, with respect to the number of participating peers in the session. To be scalable, Outreach seeks to maximize the utilization of available upload bandwidth on each participating peer, and consequently minimize the total bandwidth costs on streaming servers. With analysis, we show that Outreach constructs topologies such that peers can fully utilize their upload capacities, and present a practical distributed algorithm. With simulation-based comparison studies, we show that Outreach effectively achieves its goals in a high-churn peer-to-peer network with an assortment of peer uplink capacities and link delays     

A location‐aware peer‐to‐peer overlay network

This work describes a novel location‐aware, self‐organizing, fault‐tolerant peer‐to‐peer (P2P) overlay network, referred to as Laptop. Network locality‐aware considerations are a very important metric for designing a P2P overlay network. Several network proximity schemes have been proposed to enhance the routing efficiency of existing DHT‐based overlay networks. However, these schemes have some drawbacks such as high overlay network and routing table maintenance overhead, or not being completely self‐organizing. As a result, they may result in poor scalability as the number of nodes in the system grows. Laptop constructs a location‐aware overlay network without pre‐determined landmarks and adopts a routing cache scheme to avoid maintaining the routing table periodically. In addition, Laptop significantly reduces the overlay maintenance overhead by making each node maintain only the connectivity between parent and itself. Mathematical analysis and simulations are conducted to evaluate the efficiency, scalability, and robustness of Laptop. Our mathematical analysis shows that the routing path length is bounded by log_d N, and the joining and leaving overhead is bounded by d log_d N, where N is the number of nodes in the system, and d is the maximum degree of each node on the overlay tree. Our simulation results show that the average latency stretch is 1.6 and the average routing path length is only about three in 10 000 Laptop nodes, and the maximum degree of a node is bounded by 32. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

P2P流媒体模型的资源传输机制

针对流媒体的点播和直播服务,提出了基于P2P的流媒体应用层多播和点播的解决方案,构建了基于超级节点和普通节点的两层体系结构的视频流媒体模型.描述了模型的总体结构,分析了资源传输机制.基于校园网对模型进行了测试,测试结果表明,模型能够实现基于流媒体应用的多点数据快速互传.     

Adaptive tree-based P2P video streaming multicast system under high peer-churn rate

This paper presents an adaptive tree-based P2P video streaming multicast system under high peer-churn rate. Because peers typically display dynamic and unstable behavior during the session, a P2P video streaming multicast tree must take into account both the link delay and peer stability in order to provide a seamless video streaming multicast service with low delay. Hence, we need to adaptively update the multicast tree according to its time-varying environments in order to obtain an effective tradeoff between the delay of the tree and the relative peer stability over multicast tree. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.     

Exploiting scheduling and free‐riding for offline downloading in BitTorrent networks

Recently, the peer‐to‐peer (P2P) architecture has become a popular scheme for Internet users to rapidly exchange files. As reported in previous studies, P2P traffic accounts for a significant portion of overall Internet traffic. Many computing resources, for example, network bandwidth and disk space, may be consumed by P2P clients. Accordingly, in this paper, we devise a novel scheme that integrates advantageous features of both the conventional client–server and the P2P architectures to create an offline downloading service. Specifically, the proposed service acts as an agent that downloads required files from the BitTorrent network without consuming local computing resources. In other words, users can stay offline during the download process. Because the proposed scheme aims to provide service to numerous users at the same time, a proper scheduling technique is adopted to achieve better download performance. Moreover, a free‐riding mechanism is seamlessly incorporated with the proposed priority queuing to facilitate more effective bandwidth utilization. Empirical studies show that our scheme is promising in practical applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evolved data scheduling scheme based on layered P2P streaming in mobile network

To relieve the negative effect brought by the intricate wireless network environment and unstable user behavior in layered mobile peer-to peer(P2P) streaming service,an evolved layered P2P (E-LP2P) dat...     

A survey and comparison on overlay‐underlay mapping techniques in peer‐to‐peer overlay networks

Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) overlay networks were developed initially for file sharing such as Napster and Gnutella; but later, they have become popular for content sharing, media streaming, telephony applications, etc. Underlay‐unawareness in P2P systems can result in suboptimal peer selection for overlay routing and hence poor performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the research work carried out to solve the overlay‐underlay mapping problems up till now. The majority of underlay‐aware proposals for peer selection focus on finding the shortest overlay routes by selecting nearest nodes according to proximity information. Another class of approaches is based on passive or active probing for provision of underlay information to P2P applications. Some other optimizations propose use of P2P middleware to extract, process, and refine underlay information and provide it to P2P overlay applications. Another class of approaches strive to use ISPs or third parties to provide underlay information to P2P overlay applications according to their requirements. We have made a state‐of‐the‐art review and comparison for addressing the overlay‐underlay mismatch in terms of their operation, merits, limitations, and future directions.     

GaMe‐PLive: a new game theoretic mechanism for P2P live video streaming

GaMe‐PLive is a game theoretical framework for peer‐to‐peer live video streaming. Prevention of free‐riding and minimization of loss rate in video data transmission are the important objectives of the proposed framework. GaMe‐PLive is also extremely evasive about overhead of extra control messages exchange. At first, a static game with complete information between peers is described, which models the peer's interactive decision process for acceptance/rejection of a video chunk request. All peers repeatedly play this game during video playback periodically. Afterwards, the proposed game is analyzed to obtain a Nash equilibrium, which determines a peer's best strategic response for participation in the video chunk distribution. It will be proved that by applying some simple and feasible conditions, the desired objectives can be reached. The experimental results reveal that the proposed system has been successful in detecting free‐riders with negligible false negative and false positive rate. Also, tolerable loss chunk percentage has been satisfied in all performed tests. Besides, an interesting social norm emerges in GaMe‐PLive: Less participation leads to more missing chunks. GaMe‐PLive will be proven to be quite resistant against cheating peers. The proposed framework displays high performance even if there is not a video server with high upload bandwidth. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SeekStream: adapting to dynamic user behavior in P2P video‐on‐demand

In recent years, the users' perceived quality of experience (QoE) in streaming services has gained a lot of attention. Particularly, a number of research efforts have focused on providing live streaming and video‐on‐demand (VoD) services using peer‐to‐peer (P2P) architectures. However, in these proposed architectures, the heterogeneity of users and their dynamic behavior has not been sufficiently studied. In a real life scenario, where users have highly heterogeneous bandwidth resources (cable, DSL, 3G networks, etc) and can arbitrarily decide to perform a VCR function (stop, fast forward and seeking), ignoring this behavior can significantly deteriorate the system's efficiency and the perceived QoE. In this paper, we present SeekStream, a scalable P2P VoD architecture that ensures the stable delivery of the video stream to every participating user even in cases of high heterogeneity and frequent seeking operations. Specifically, SeekStream is a set of algorithms that optimize the P2P overlay dynamically and in a distributed fashion, making it adaptive to users dynamic behavior and bandwidth changes. The available bandwidth resources of the participating users are optimally exploited, keeping the contribution from the media server(s) to a minimal level. To illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithms, we are using a centralized overlay network manager that discovers the optimal network graph as a reference. We have developed an extensive P2P VoD simulator that shows the efficiency, scalability, and stability of our system under variant and dynamic conditions. The algorithms of our proposed system introduce less than 4% bandwidth overhead while we achieve high offloading of the media server(s). SeekStream guarantees a high block reception rate for the users, even under extreme seeking patterns. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic Transmission Scheduling for Streaming Applications via P2P Overlay

In current Peer-to-Peer streaming applications, a lot of research attempts to provide timely stream services to the end users. Most of them focus on how to organize the peer connections into an efficient overlay network. Due to the variation in the network, a lot of overhead is generated when the overlay structure adapts to the changes. In order to minimize the impact of network fluctuation, we proposed a scheduling algorithm which helps to distribute stream data efficiently through the fluctuating networks. It needs only partial information about overlay structure and provides the services to satisfy most number of users. The global latency experienced by peers in the system is thus minimized. To alleviate the problem of packet loss along the overlay, we introduce retransmission requests into our scheduling algorithm. Requests for much needed data are treated with higher priority. Parent peers which receive the request will re-send the missing data to minimize the loss impact. The missing data which are needed by more peers will have a larger cumulative impact through the tree overlay and these are thus scheduled and sent earlier. Simulation results showed that our prioritization and scheduling algorithm minimizes the negative impact of fluctuation and data loss in a dynamic network environment.     

Exploring the accuracy of capturing snapshots in large‐scale P2P IPTV systems

With the growing maturity of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) technology, Internet protocol television (IPTV) applications based on that gained great success commercially and have attracted more and more attentions from both industry and academia. Currently, the active measurement method based on crawler technology is the most popular and effective one to study P2P IPTV systems. Existing measurement results revealed that accuracy of captured overlay snapshots depends on the crawling speed of crawler system. In order to capture more accurate overlay snapshots of P2P IPTV system, we developed a very fast and efficient distributed crawler system using the distributed architecture and peer degree‐rank mechanism. In this paper, we first introduce the architectures of PPTV channel‐list resource distribution and the whole system, which is the most popular and largest instance of P2P IPTV applications nowadays. Subsequently, this paper evaluates the crawling results of two dedicated crawlers capturing from peer‐list servers and ordinary peers, respectively. Finally, we propose a fast and accurate dedicated crawler system based on distributed architecture and peer degree rank for PPTV. The experiment results show that the performance of our distributed crawler system is much better than other existing crawler systems. Specifically, our distributed crawler can track a very popular channel with about 7200 online users in 30 s. It is also reasonable to believe that our distributed crawler system can capture complete overlay snapshots. To the best of our knowledge, our study work is the first to explore capturing accurate overlay snapshots of large‐scale P2P IPTV applications. Our crawler system can provide a good solution for capturing more accurate overlay snapshots of PPTV system and can also be used to help researchers to design crawler systems for other P2P IPTV systems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed upload bandwidth assigning algorithm in P2P VoD system

In a peer-to-peer(P2P) live streaming system,each peer uses greedy strategy to download chunks as many as possible so as to assure smooth playback and promote the chunk propagation.However,diversity of video playback rate,heterogeneity of peer downlink bandwidth and no prefetching limitation determine that greedy strategy is not the best strategy for P2P video-on-demand(VoD) system though this strategy performs well in P2P live system.To reasonably assign upload bandwidth among peers,we first present a stochastic model to relate expected downloading speed(EDS) with buffered data amount(BDA,the amount of data has been fetched in buffer,however has not been played yet by the peer),video playback rate and fluency(the probability of no interruption in a viewing process).On the base of this model,we design an equal fluency bandwidth assigning algorithm(EFBAA).In this algorithm,requesting peers compute EDS according to several local parameters(such as BDA,video playback rate and fluency) dynamically and independently and send the EDS to neighbor peers together with buffer map.Then the neighbor peer proportionally partitions and assigns its upload bandwidth to requesting peers according to their EDS.Extensive simulations demonstrate that EFBAA outperforms greedy strategy in terms of server load and startup latency.