Distributed multi-source streaming models in peer-to-peer overlay networks

A multimedia contents are distributed to peer computers (peers) and a contents peer which holds contents can provide other peers with the contents in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. Here, contents peers are mainly realized in less-reliable and low-performance personal computers. Multimedia streaming is more significant than downloading ways in multimedia applications from security and economical reasons. We discuss distributed multi-source streaming models to support peers with reliable and scalable multimedia streaming service. Here, a collection of multiple contents peers in parallel transmit packets of a multimedia content to a leaf peer to realize the reliability and scalability. Each of the contents peers send different packets from the other contents peers at slower rate. Even if not only some number of peers stop by fault and are degraded in performance but also some number of packets are lost and delayed in networks, a leaf peer has to receive every data of a content at the required rate. We discuss how to replicate data of a multimedia content by creating a parity packet for some number of packets and to allocate packets to each contents peer so that a leaf peer can deliver a packet without waiting for preceding packets from other contents peers in presence of the faults. Next, multiple contents peers are required to be synchronized to send packets to a leaf-peer so that the leaf-peer can receive every data of a content at the required rate. We discuss a pair of gossip-based flooding-based protocols, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based coordination protocol (DCoP) and tree-based (TCoP) coordination protocol to synchronize multiple contents peers to send in parallel send to a leaf peer. First, some number of contents peers are selected and start transmitting packets to a leaf peer. Then, each of the selected peers selects some number of peers. Here, a peer can be selected by multiple peers in DCoP but by at most one peer in TCoP. Finally, every contents peer transmits packets to the leaf peer at the allocated rate. We evaluate the coordination protocols DCoP and TCoP in terms of how long it takes and how many messages are transmitted to synchronize multiple contents peers.     

P2P Object-based adaptivE Multimedia Streaming (POEMS)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm has recently gained tremendous attraction and is widely used for content distribution and sharing. The future multimedia communication applications have to support the user’s needs, the terminal capabilities, the content specification and the underlying networking technologies. They should be network-aware, topology-aware, and end-user-centric. Thus, in this paper, we use the characteristics of the object-based encoding scheme and P2P network topology to propose adaptive content delivery architecture for P2P networks. We propose an efficient mechanism for transmission of real-time content over P2P networks, called POEMS (P2P Object-based adaptivE Multimedia Streaming). This object-based audio-visual quality adaptive mechanism over P2P networks is media-aware, network-aware, and user-centric that is carried-out through (1) selection of appropriate sending peers willing to participate in the streaming mechanism, (2) organization of sending peers by constructing an overlay network to facilitate content delivery and adaptation, (3) dynamicity management of peers when some peer enters or leaves the system to maintain an acceptable level of perceived video quality, and (4) ensuring the end-to-end QoS (Quality of Services) by orchestrating the overall streaming mechanism. The obtained results demonstrate that combining content adaptation using object-based encoding and advance network-aware peers selection based on peer monitoring leads to intelligent, efficient, and large-scale support of multimedia services over complex network architectures.

A P4P-integrated data-driven P2P system for the live multimedia streaming service

The Proactive network Provider Participation for the P2P (P4P) architecture deploys central servers, which perceives network status and provides peering suggestions to P2P systems in order to achieve better network resource utilization while supporting best possible application performance. However, P4P alone may not be able to make appropriate peering suggestions for live multimedia streaming since it does not include mechanisms to reflect some of the parameters that are important to the QoS of live multimedia streaming such as upload bandwidth and stability of a peer as a stream deliverer. Furthermore, peer synchronization and parent replacement in the middle of a session, which are critical issues to the QoS of live multimedia streaming, are also left as the matters to be dealt with by the P2P systems alone. Most of the existing data-driven P2P systems leverage periodic information exchanges among neighboring peers in order to cope with these problems, which may incur long delay and high control overhead. In this paper, we proposed P4P-integrated data-driven P2P system for live multimedia streaming service. The proposed system includes not only the peering suggestion mechanism appropriate for live multimedia streaming but also the peer synchronization and parent replacement mechanisms, which exploit the centralized P4P framework and do not require periodic control information exchanges. We implemented the system in NS-2 simulator and compared its performance to the P4P and existing data-driven P2P systems. The results from experiments show that the proposed system enhances QoS compared to the existing data-driven P2P systems while maintaining the same level of network efficiency of the original P4P.     

SmartPeerCast: a Smart QoS driven P2P live streaming framework

The P2P swarm technologies have been shown to be very efficient for medium scale content distribution systems in the last few years, such as the file sharing and video-on-demand (VOD) applications. However it is still an open topic about how to deploy the P2P paradigm for the real time video broadcasting (RTVB) applications. The P2P RTVB application is different from the cache based P2P system because it has more stringent restrictions for startup time and packet loss ratio. In this paper, an adaptive media broadcasting P2P framework named SmartPeerCast which employs the media transrating service to control the quality of service (QoS), is proposed. SmartPeerCast achieves a network awareness, codec awareness, and high performance RTVB service with four key designs: (1) It groups the newly joined peers into different quality clusters by their uploading capability. This clustering mechanism avoids the bandwidth bottleneck between the heterogeneous peers of the overall P2P overlay by only forwarding the same quality stream over the peers in the same cluster. (2) The streaming quality is adjusted adaptively between the sending and the receiving peers by a Smart QoS algorithm to compensate for the network jitters to reduce the receiving peer’s playback jitter. (3) The receiving peer monitors the data forwarding QoS of the sending peer to select the best suitable parent node dynamically. The SmartPeerCast uses this Smart QoS framework to implement an incentive mechanism to award the peers with high uploading contributions by migrating them to a higher quality cluster. (4) A transrating engine is used at the leaf nodes of the high quality cluster to forward the stream with suitable bits rate to the nodes of the low quality cluster; this transrating service not only can fully utilize the uploading bandwidth of the peers in the higher quality cluster but also avoids the bandwidth bottleneck of stream forwarding between the heterogeneous peers. Our experiment results and the real deployment show that SmartPeerCast can eliminate the bandwidth bottleneck and content bottleneck between the heterogeneous peers with a smaller startup time and packet loss and it is a high performance and medium scale P2P RTVB framework.     

Delay Management in Mesh-Based P2P Live Streaming Using a Three-Stage Peer Selection Strategy

Peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming systems have gained popularity due to the self-scalability property of the P2P overlay networks. In P2P live streaming, peers retrieve stream content from other peers in the system. Therefore, peer selection strategy is a fundamental element to build an overlay which manages the playback delay and startup delay experienced by the peers. In this paper, we propose a peer selection strategy which manages to build a minimum delay overlay using three different stages of overlay construction. In the first stage, the tracker suggests some peers as prospective partners to a new peer. In the second stage, the peer selects its partners out of these peers such that delay is minimized. The third stage is the topology adaptation phase of peers, where peers reposition themselves in the overlay to maintain minimum delay during peer churn. In the proposed peer selection strategy, peers are selected in all the stages based on parameters such as propagation delay, upload capacity, buffering duration and buffering level. The proposed strategy is compared with two existing strategies in the literature: Fast-Mesh (Ren et al. in IEEE Trans Multimed 11: 1446, 2009) and Hybrid live p2p streaming protocol (Hammami et al., 2014) using simulations. Our results show that playback delay and startup delay are reduced significantly with the help of proposed strategy. We demonstrate that the stability of the system also improves during peer churn.     

A multi-layer experimental study of multimedia and QoS communication in wireless mesh networks

A significant issue in Mesh networks is to support multimedia transmissions while providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to mobile users. For real-time multimedia streaming, unstable throughput or insufficient bandwidth will incur unexpected delay or jitter, and it remains difficult to provide comprehensive service guarantees for a wireless mesh environment. In this paper, we target the problem of providing multimedia QoS in wireless mesh networks. We design and implement a campus test-bed for supporting multimedia traffic in mobile wireless mesh networks, and investigate in detail some possible improvements on a number of layers to enable multimedia transmission over wireless networks with QoS support. We first study a number of improvements of some existing routing protocols to support multimedia transmissions. Some new admission control and rate control mechanisms are studied and their performance gains are verified in our experiments. In our new cross-layer adaptive rate control (CLARC) mechanism, we adaptively change the video encoder’s output bit rate based on the available network bandwidth to improve the quality of the received video. We also design a mobile gateway protocol to connect the MANET to Internet and a wireless LAN management protocol to automatically manage WLAN to provide some QoS.     

融合网络异构P2P流媒体系统抗扰动性研究

融合网络中的异构P2P流媒体系统中具有多种终端、应用及节目类型,使得用户行为模式复杂,为系统稳定性带来了挑战。针对以上问题提出融合网络异构P2P流媒体系统稳定性增强策略。通过分析流媒体系统用户日志,确定用户行为影响因素,在此基础上对不同类型的用户行为进行收集及拟合,进行基于可靠性分析的路由、资源信息维护及合作节点选择,提高了系统资源信息维护准确性及节点间数据合作有效性。使用真实系统日志驱动的仿真实验验证了该策略的效果。     

Enhancing P2P overlay network architecture for live multimedia streaming

The number of live multimedia streaming applications is increasing, explaining the use of many overlay network topologies. Application-layer multicast (ALM) that it is a feasible alternative to multimedia stream has attracted considerable attention. However, a serious problem of ALM is that the multicast tree may be fragile, and peer failure causes tree partitions. This work presents a novel Hierarchical Ring Tree (HRT) architecture for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live multimedia streaming. The proposed architecture combines ring-based and tree-based structures in a robust, scalable, reliable and resilient structure that can be used practically as an ALM topology. When peers enter or leave the system, the topology can be recovered rapidly such that live multimedia stream can be delivered smoothly with a low latency. The proposed HRT topology is maintained efficiently without splitting or merging trees. The performance of the proposed architecture and algorithms is evaluated experimentally. Experimental results indicate that the proposed topology can be used in a high-churn P2P network with a small delay. Simulation and experiment results reveal that the proposed architecture has a lower overhead than the ZIGZAG approach when handling peers’ joining or leaving, exhibits faster recovery, better quality-of-service during streaming, and a more robust topology, even with an extremely high number of peers joining/leaving.     

Scalable Live Streaming Service Based on Interoverlay Optimization

In order to provide scalable live-streaming services, we propose an Inter-Overlay Optimization scheme, IOO. Instead of selecting better paths in the same overlay, IOO constructs efficient paths using peers in different overlays, so as to (i) improve global resource utilization of P2P streaming networks; (ii) assign resources based on their locality and delay; (iii) guarantee streaming service quality by using the nearest peers, even when such peers might belong to different overlays; and (iv) balance the load among the group (streaming overlay) members. We compare the performance of IOO with existing approaches through trace driven simulations. Results show that IOO outperforms previous schemes in terms of resource utilization and the QoS of streaming services. IOO scheme has been implemented in an Internet based live streaming system, called AnySee. AnySee was successfully released in the summer of 2004 in CERNET of China. Over 60,000 users enjoy massive entertainment programs, including TV programs, movies, and academic conferences videos.     

LiquidStream��network dependent dynamic P2P live streaming

A successful P2P live streaming system must achieve high uploading bandwidth utilization, fast stream distribution, uniform bandwidth distribution among participating peers, flexibility and adaptation to the underlying network conditions and peer behavior. This paper proposes a novel architecture that meets these requirements. By the use of distributed optimization algorithms we propose a dynamically reconfigurable overlay architecture that organizes its peers according to network locality information and heterogeneous uploading capabilities of them. The benefits of our optimized overlay are fully exploited by our proposed scheduler, which guarantees the complete and fast distribution of the stream. The evaluation of our system under a series of scenarios that take into account the all requirements above reveals the advantages of our proposed system.     

基于服务质量的对等网络流模型的研究与设计

在网格环境下的分布式数据流管理系统中,传统的客户/服务器结构的数据传输和处理方式存在着巨大的性能瓶颈问题.借鉴对等网络在应用层传输数据方面的优势,将应用层服务质量的概念引入到P2P Streaming(对等网络流)模型中来,并基于此设计出一套启发式的算法,使得数据流在对等节点间的传输大大优化.在相应原型系统上的仿真实验结果表明,新模趔在服务质量上明显优于传统模型.并且,新模型也更加适于不同服务质量需求的各类分布式系统.     

P2P流媒体直播系统覆盖网拓扑优化算法

针对对等(P2P)流媒体直播系统中节点的异构性问题,将系统节点分为不同级别,基于随机行走算法选择邻居节点,采用Metropolis- Hastings算法计算随机行走的转移矩阵,从而保证节点能以较大的概率选择到系统中级别较高的节点,并进一步描述覆盖网拓扑优化算法。仿真实验结果表明,该算法能促进节点协作,降低系统延时,在动态网络环境下具有良好的鲁棒性。     

An efficient playout smoothing mechanism for layered streaming in P2P networks

Layered video streaming in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has drawn great interest, since it can not only accommodate large numbers of users, but also handle peer heterogeneity. However, there’s still a lack of comprehensive studies on chunk scheduling for the smooth playout of layered streams in P2P networks. In these situations, a playout smoothing mechanism can be used to ensure the uniform delivery of the layered stream. This can be achieved by reducing the quality changes that the stream undergoes when adapting to changing network conditions. This paper complements previous efforts in throughput maximization and delay minimization for P2P streaming by considering the consequences of playout smoothing on the scheduling mechanisms for stream layer acquisition. The two main problems to be considered when designing a playout smoothing mechanism for P2P streaming are the fluctuation in available bandwidth between peers and the unreliability of user-contributed resources—particularly peer churn. Since the consideration of these two factors in the selection and scheduling of stream layers is crucial to maintain smooth stream playout, the main objective of our smoothing mechanism becomes the determination of how many layers to request from which peers, and in which order. In this work, we propose a playout smoothing mechanism for layered P2P streaming. The proposed mechanism relies on a novel scheduling algorithm that enables each peer to select appropriate stream layers, along with appropriate peers to provide them. In addition to playout smoothing, the presented mechanism also makes efficient use of network resources and provides high system throughput. An evaluation of the performance of the mechanism demonstrates that the proposed mechanism provides a significant improvement in the received video quality in terms of lowering the number of layer changes and useless chunks while improving bandwidth utilization.     

An intelligent scheduling scheme for real-time traffic management using Cooperative Game Theory and AHP-TOPSIS methods for next generation telecommunication networks

The emerging and exponential growth of telecommunication networks have developed a variety of smart and powerful devices to handle a wide range of multimedia applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP), video streaming, etc. 3GPP introduced Long Term Evolution (LTE) in release 8 and LTE-Advanced (A) in release 10 to support multimedia traffic as these technologies offers high data rate, high bandwidth, and low latency. It also created new challenges to handle resource allocation and power optimization of User Equipment (UE). The paper explores radio resource allocation and power consumption problem of UE in LTE environment. An intelligent scheduling scheme developed is based on Cooperative Game Theory (CGT) method and AHP-TOPSIS method. It distributes resources in a fair way among a number of applications and UE are prioritized based on certain criteria like delay, throughput history, UE buffer space and channel conditions and preferences. In LTE, Discontinuous Reception (DRX) has been adopted to conserve the battery life of UE. DRX periodically switches off the radio interfaces to conserve the battery life but it may breach Quality of Service (QoS). Therefore, the DRX parameters need to be further optimized to satisfy QoS and minimize power consumption of UE. DRX parameters are dynamically adjusted on the basis of current load and channel condition of the network. Power saving operations are numerically analyzed. Simulation results show that the expert and an intelligent system can distribute resources in a fair way among UE, improves the battery consumption of UE up to 85% and packets transmission delay by 10% as compared to existing scheme for real-time applications.     

基于Spines覆盖网络的流媒体并行传输研究

以Spines覆盖网络通用平台为基础,对流媒体数据多流并行传输的相关问题进行了研究。简要介绍了Spines网络,根据流媒体实时并行传输的要求,对Spines网络中的相关协议进行了改进,并引入了具有QoS保证的覆盖网络多路路由策略、DHT技术及LEACH协议。     

一种分层P2 P流媒体系统重叠网的构建策略

基于Peer-to-Peer(P2P)技术的流媒体应用具有部署效率高及可扩展性好等突出优势。而采用分层视频编码技术的P2P流媒体系统把原视频流分解为多个视频层数据进行分发,让节点能够选择与自己带宽资源相匹配的视频质量,使其很好地适应节点的异构性。但是各分层视频数据传输的路径存在较大差异,使重叠网构建策略面临更大的挑战。因此定义了基于分层视频编码技术环境下的P2P流媒体重叠网络构建问题,并证明该问题是一个NP难问题。提出了一种构建重叠网的集中启发式算法,同时还提出了一种基于视频组(Streaming Group)的分布式重叠网络构建策略。通过大规模网络仿真实验验证了基于该分布式重叠网构建策略的分层流媒体系统具备低服务器带宽占用、高数据获取率等优点。     

Seamless handover between unicast and multicast multimedia streams

With the deployment of heterogeneous networks, mobile users are expecting ubiquitous connectivity when using applications. For bandwidth-intensive applications such as Interact Protocol Television （IPTV）, multimedia contents are typical- ly transmitted using a multicast delivery method due to its bandwidth efficiency. However, not all networks support multicasting. Multicasting alone could lead to service disruption when the users move from a multicast-capable network to a non-multicast network. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme called application layer seamless switching （ALSS） to provide smooth real-time multimedia delivery across unicast and multicast networks. ALSS adopts a soft handover to achieve seamless playback during the handover period. A real-time streaming testbed is implemented to investigate the overall handover performance, espe- cially the overlapping period where both network interfaces are receiving audio and video packets. Both the quality of service （QoS） and objective-mapped quality of experience （QoE） metrics are measured. Experimental results show that the overlapping period takes a minimum of 56 and 4 ms for multicast-to-unicast （M2U） and unicast-to-multicast （U2M） handover, respectively. The measured peak signal-to-noise ratio （PSNR） confirms that the frame-by-frame quality of the streamed video during the handover is at least 33 dB, which is categorized as good based on ITU-T recommendations. The estimated mean opinion score （MOS） in terms of video playback smoothness is also at a satisfactory level.     

InstantLeap: an architecture for fast neighbor discovery in large-scale P2P VoD streaming

In large-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) video-on-demand (VoD) streaming applications, a fundamental challenge is to quickly locate new supplying peers whenever a VCR command is issued, in order to achieve smooth viewing experiences. For many existing commercial systems which use tracker servers for neighbor discovery, the increasing scale of P2P VoD systems has overloaded the dedicated servers to the point where they cannot accurately identify the suppliers with the desired content and bandwidth. To avoid overloading the servers and achieve instant neighbor discovery over the self-organizing P2P overlay, we design a novel method of organizing peers watching a video. The method features a light-weight indexing architecture to support efficient streaming and fast neighbor discovery at the same time. InstantLeap separates the neighbors at each peer into a streaming neighbor list and a shortcut neighbor list, for streaming and neighbor discovery respectively, which are maintained loosely but effectively based on random neighbor list exchanges. Our analysis shows that InstantLeap achieves an O(1) neighbor discovery efficiency upon any playback “leap” across the media stream in streaming overlays of any size, and low messaging costs for overlay maintenance upon peer join, departure, and VCR operations. We also verify our design with large-scale simulation studies of dynamic P2P VoD systems based on real-world settings.     

Integrated buffering schemes for P2P VoD services

How to improve the scalability and QoS of peer-to-peer on-demand streaming system based on unstructured overlay is still a problem. Researchers have proposed some memory based buffering schemes to archive the targets. Considering the limited space of memory on one peer, a new caching strategy, which can integrate memory-caching strategy with disk-caching strategy, is proposed to make full use of peers memory, disk and bandwidth resources. Based on the new strategy, peers can request media data from neighbors of the overlay, buffer the fresh part into the memory slots and the watched part into the free local disk, which can enlarge the capacity to buffer media data. Based on the new scheme, the experimental results show that the new caching strategy improves the service capacity and QoS of the whole system greatly. The load of the media server is obviously alleviated and the continuity of playing media data is obviously improved.     

An Alliance Based Peering Scheme for P2P Live Media Streaming

While recent measurement studies have shown the effectiveness of P2P network in media streaming, there have been questions raised about the quality of service (QoS), reliability of streaming services and sub optimal uplink utilization in particular. P2P streaming systems are inherently less reliable because of churn, internet dynamics, node heterogeneity and randomness in the swarm. We present a new model for P2P media streaming based on clustering of peers, called alliances. We show that alliance formation is a loosely coupled and an effective way to organize the peers. We show that our model maps to a ldquosmall-worldrdquo network, which form efficient overlay structures and are robust to network perturbations such as churn. We present a comparative simulation based study of our model with CoolStreaming/DONet and present a quantitative performance evaluation. Simulation results are promising and show that our model scales well under varying workloads and conditions, delivers near optimal levels of QoS, and for most cases, performs at par or even better than CoolStreaming/DONet.