Multimedia streaming of mostly user generated content is an ongoing trend, not only since the upcoming of Last.fm and YouTube. A distributed decentralized multimedia streaming architecture can spread the (traffic) costs to the user nodes, but requires to provide for load balancing and consider the heterogeneity of the participating nodes. We propose a DHT-based information gathering and analyzing architecture which controls the streaming request assignment in the system and thoroughly evaluate it in comparison to a distributed stateless strategy. We evaluated the impact of the key parameters in the allocation function which considers the capabilities of the nodes and their contribution to the system. Identifying the quality-bandwidth tradeoffs of the information gathering system, we show that with our proposed system a 53% better load balancing can be reached and the efficiency of the system is significantly improved.

Load balancing for multimedia streaming in heterogeneous peer-to-peer systems

In the past few years, video streaming has been one of the most prominent applications in the Internet. There are basically two types of approaches to deliver on-demand video streams: infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less. The infrastructure-based approach, also known as the content delivery network (CDN) approach, employs numerous replicate servers and proxies to assist video streaming. The main drawback of this approach is that it is costly to deploy numerous servers and proxies. The infrastructure-less approach, also known as the peer-to-peer (P2P) approach, employs numerous peers to relay video streams. The main drawback of the P2P approach is its instability due to frequent joining/leaving of peers. The state-of-the-art development is to combine the two types of approaches. In this paper, we employ multiple description coding (MDC) to develop a novel P2P-assisted proxy caching scheme, called MP3, for on-demand video streaming. Our simulation results show that with the use of MDC, MP3 can effectively provide adaptive video quality for clients in a heterogeneous network environment.

Quality-Adaptive Proxy Caching for Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Using Multiple Description Coding

Multimedia contents are distributed to peers in various ways in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. A peer which holds a content, even a part of a content can provide other peers with the content. Multimedia streaming is more significant in multimedia applications than downloading ways in Internet applications. We discuss how to support peers with multimedia streaming service by using multiple contents peers. In our distributed multi-source streaming model, a collection of multiple contents peers in parallel transmit packets of a multimedia content to a requesting leaf peer to realize the reliability and scalability without any centralized controller. Even if some peer stops by fault and is degraded in performance and packets are lost and delayed in networks, a requesting leaf peer receives every data of a content at the required rate. We discuss a pair of flooding-based protocols, distributed and tree-based coordination protocols DCoP and TCoP, to synchronize multiple contents peers to reliably and efficiently deliver packets to a requesting peer. A peer can be redundantly selected by multiple peers in DCoP but it taken by at most one peer in TCoP. We evaluate the protocols in terms of how long it takes and how many messages are transmitted to synchronize multiple contents peers.

/pdf/distributed-coordination-protocols-to-realize-scalable-23k30u1fdi.pdf

Distributed Coordination Protocols to Realize Scalable Multimedia Streaming in Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks

Multimedia contents are distributed to peers in various ways in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. A peer which holds a content, even a part of a content can provide other peers with the content. Multimedia streaming is more significant in multimedia applications than downloading ways in Internet applications. We discuss how to support peers with multimedia streaming service by using multiple contents peers. In our distributed multi-source streaming model, a collection of multiple contents peers in parallel transmit packets of a multimedia content to a requesting leaf peer to realize the reliability and scalability without any centralized controller. Even if some peer stops by fault and is degraded in performance and packets are lost and delayed in networks, a requesting leaf peer receives every data of a content at the required rate. We discuss a pair of flooding-based protocols, distributed and treebased coordination protocols DCoP and TCoP, to synchronize multiple contents peers to reliably and efficiently deliver packets to a requesting peer. A peer can be redundantly selected by multiple peers in DCoP but it taken by at most one peer in TCoP. 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.

Distributed coordination protocols to realize scalable Multimedia streaming in peer-to-peer overlay networks

http://yoksis.bilkent.edu.tr/pdf/files/10.1016-j.ejor.2006.07.031.pdf

A Lagrangean relaxation and decomposition algorithm for the video placement and routing problem

We propose a novel low-cost video-on-demand architecture for heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks. The key idea of this architecture is to aggregate peers' storage and bandwidths to facilitate on-demand video streaming. To achieve this goal, we split published videos into segments and distribute them to different peers. When watching a video, a peer searches the corresponding segments, and then aggregates bandwidths from multiple supplying peers to stream the video. Instead of relying on the powerful servers/proxies, this architecture exploits the often-underutilized peers' resources, which makes it cost-effective. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed architecture through extensive simulation experiments on large, Internet-like topologies.

Xin Liu

Papers

Supporting low-cost video-on-demand in heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks