P2broadcast: a hierarchical clustering live video streaming system for P2P networks

This work describes a novel live video streaming system for P2P networks, referred to as P2broadcast. The video streaming service has bandwidth requirements to guarantee presentation quality. Therefore, a scalable strategy to quickly find a path from a media server to a client with abundant bandwidth is very important. A common approach in the literature is the bandwidth first (BF) scheme, which allows a newcomer to adopt a BF tree traversal scheme to find its parent peer on the P2P overlay tree to retrieve the media content. The BF scheme is likely to build a deep overlay tree, resulting in long start‐up latency as the number of peers on the overlay tree grows. P2broadcast reduces start‐up latency by organizing peers into hierarchical clusters and making the overlay tree become a ‘short‐and‐wide’ tree. The hierarchical clustering structure enables a newcomer to find its parent peer among the set of peers that are more likely to provide large available bandwidth only. Limiting the set of potential parent peers not only reduces start‐up latency but also improves the system availability. Additionally, unlike the BF scheme that only concerns available bandwidth, P2broadcast utilizes a cost function to evaluate the appropriateness of a potential parent peer. The cost function considers the depth of the newcomer on the overlay tree, making the overlay tree become a short‐and‐wide tree. In addition to start‐up latency reduction, the short‐and‐wide tree feature also alleviates the service interruption probability due to the leaving or failure of a peer. Our simulation results show that P2broadcast greatly outperforms the BF scheme in terms of system availability, and achieves around 66% savings in start‐up latency and 10% decrement in service interruption probability. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

分层P2P实时流媒体系统中基于演进博弈的超级组对等节点选择算法

针对分层混合式P2P实时流媒体系统中的超级组对等节点选择问题,提出了以一种基于演进博弈论的分布式超级对等节点选择算法。首先使用演进博弈框架对P2P实时流媒体系统中的超级对等节点选择问题进行了建模,并对其演进稳定策略进行了求解分析。然后通过得到的混合策略设计了一种基于Q-Leaning的分布式SGP选择算法ESS-SGP,以达到激励对等组内的对等节点之间互相协作的目的。实验结果表明,与传统的随机选择超级对等节点方法相比,使用ESS-SGP算法所选择产生的超级组对等节点能够稳定地为系统提供更高的流媒体上传速率,使整个P2P流媒体系统的上传能力随着对等节点数目的增加而稳定增加,并为每个对等节点带来更好的收益。     

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.     

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...     

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.     

Game‐theoretic auction design for bandwidth sharing in helper‐assisted P2P streaming

Video traffic offloading through the helper peers can significantly alleviate the server workload and enhance users' quality of experience. In this paper, the complex interactions of a number of helpers seeking to trade their bandwidth surplus in a peer‐to‐peer market are studied using non‐cooperative game theory and double auction. In particular, a non‐cooperative game is formulated among the helpers in which each helper can make a decision on the maximum amount of upload bandwidth surplus that it is willing to sell so as to maximize its utility function that reflects the tradeoff between the benefits from bandwidth sharing and its associated costs. Then, the price governing the bandwidth trading market between the helpers and peers is determined via a truthful double auction mechanism. To solve the game, an algorithm based on the best response dynamics is proposed using which helpers can reach a Nash equilibrium point. Simulation results exhibit that the proposed algorithm achieves significant performance improvements in terms of utility per selling helpers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CDNPatch: a cost‐effective failover mechanism for hybrid CDN‐P2P live streaming systems

Among the most well‐established live media distribution technologies is content delivery network (CDN), which improves user‐perceived quality of service by delivering content from proxy servers deployed at the Internet's edge. In recent years, CDN providers started to tap into their subscribers' peer‐to‐peer (P2P) capacity to alleviate their server costs. Under the inherent peer dynamics, a major challenge of these hybrid CDN‐P2P systems is to provide efficient failure recovery with good quality of service guarantees at a reduced server cost. In this work we propose a cost‐effective failover solution named CDNPatch to address the aforementioned problem. CDNPatch enables peers to periodically precompute a few backup content suppliers by efficient information exchange and maintenance algorithms, and leverages auxiliary CDN servers and an economic server provisioning algorithm to reduce the chance of playback interruption occurring to peers. Our simulation results show that CDNPatch can mask the impact of peer dynamics of 3 real P2P systems, namely, SOPCast, PPStream, and PPTV, with 100 % failure recovery success rate and a failure recovery time less than 1 second at a cost of small P2P communication overhead of less than 1 kilobits per second, while using only 10%, 21%, and 51%, respectively, of the pure CDN scheme's server consumption.     

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.     

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.     

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 self‐adaptive algorithm for super‐peer selection considering the mobility of peers in cognitive mobile peer‐to‐peer networks

Cognitive peer‐to‐peer networks are obtained from a combination of cognitive networking concepts and peer‐to‐peer networks. These networks are able to improve their performance while operating under dynamic and unknown environments. A cognitive peer‐to‐peer network tries to learn an appropriate configuration for itself considering the unknown physical properties of peers. Cognitive mobile peer‐to‐peer networks refer to cognitive peer‐to‐peer networks which are built over mobile ad hoc networks. In these networks, heterogeneity of the mobility of peers and resource limitation in wireless networks create challenges for network management algorithms. Because of the dynamicity of these networks, the management algorithms should be designated in self‐adaptive manner. In one type of these networks, some peers, called super‐peers, undertake to perform network managerial tasks. The mobility of peers leads to connection failure among peers and reselection of new super‐peers. Therefore, the selection of super‐peers, due to their influential role, requires an algorithm that considers the peers' mobility. Up to now, no self‐adaptive algorithm has been designated for super‐peer selection considering the mobility of peers in a self‐adaptive manner. This paper proposes M‐SSBLA, a self‐adaptive algorithm for super‐peer selection considering the mobility of peers based on learning automata. The proposed algorithm is obtained from cooperation between a learning automata‐based cognitive engine and MIS. MIS is a well‐known super‐peer selection algorithm in mobile peer‐to‐peer networks. We compared the proposed algorithm with recently reported algorithms, especially for a network with high mobility. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can cover maximum ordinary‐peer with a few super‐peer and improve robustness against super‐peer failures while decreasing maintenance overhead.     

Characterizing Peer-to-Peer Streaming Flows

The fundamental advantage of peer-to-peer (P2P) multimedia streaming applications is to leverage peer upload capacities to minimize bandwidth costs on dedicated streaming servers. The available bandwidth among peers is of pivotal importance to P2P streaming applications, especially as the number of peers in the streaming session reaches a very large scale. In this paper, we utilize more than 230 GB of traces collected from a commercial P2P streaming system, UUSee, over a four-month period of time. With such traces, we seek to thoroughly understand and characterize the achievable bandwidth of streaming flows among peers in large-scale real-world P2P live streaming sessions, in order to derive useful insights towards the improvement of current-generation P2P streaming protocols, such as peer selection. Using continuous traces over a long period of time, we explore evolutionary properties of inter-peer bandwidth. Focusing on representative snapshots of the entire topology at specific times, we investigate distributions of inter-peer bandwidth in various peer ISP/area/type categories, and statistically test and model the deciding factors that cause the variance of such inter-peer bandwidth. Our original discoveries in this study include: (1) The ISPs that peers belong to are more correlated to inter-peer bandwidth than their geographic locations; (2) There exist excellent linear correlations between peer last-mile bandwidth availability and inter-peer bandwidth within the same ISP, and between a subset of ISPs as well; and (3) The evolution of inter-peer bandwidth between two ISPs exhibits daily variation patterns. Based on these insights, we design a throughput expectation index that facilitates high-bandwidth peer selection without performing any measurements.     

A handover-aware seamless video streaming scheme in heterogeneous wireless networks

With the development of wireless technologies, video streaming services over heterogeneous wireless networks have become more popular in recent years. Video streaming schemes for heterogeneous networks should consider vertical handover in which the link capacity is varied significantly, because the quality experienced for a video streaming service is affected by the network status. When a vertical handover occurs, an abrupt bandwidth change and substantial handover latency lead to bursty packet loss and discontinuity of the video playback. In this paper, we propose a handover-aware video streaming scheme to provide seamless video streaming services over heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed scheme adjusts its sending rate and the quality level of the transmitted video streams according to the significant bandwidth variation that occurs in a vertical handover. To expedite the response to the bandwidth variation due to a handover, our scheme uses an explicit notification message that informs the streaming server of a client's handover occurrence. In order to evaluate the performance, we use a simulation environment for a vertical handover between wireless local area networks and cellular networks. Through the simulation results, we prove that our scheme improves the experienced quality of video streaming in vertical handovers.