Achieving Performance and Robustness in P2P Streaming Systems

This paper present a thorough and homogeneous comparison of chunk and peer selection strategies suitable for mesh- ased, live, P2P streaming applications. Strategies are studied in a context of push protocols, and it is shown that none of the schedulers analyzed, which are, to the best of our knowledge, the majority of those proposed in the literature, offer acceptable performances on a range of scenarios commonly encountered in networks. Results also show that the key weakness is in the peer selection strategy. Based on these observations, we propose a new peer selection strategy which blends together an optimal peer selection for homogeneous networks with a bandwidth aware approach. Extended experiments show that under all the scenarios considered this peer scheduler performs consistently better than all the others, specially when coupled with a deadline-based, robust chunk selection strategy.