InstantLeap: Fast neighbor discovery in P2P VoD streaming

Abstract

A fundamental challenge in peer-to-peer (P2P) Video-on-Demand (VoD) streaming is to quickly locate new supplying peers whenever a VCR command is issued, in order to achieve smooth viewing experiences. For most existing commercial systems which resort to tracking servers for such neighbor discovery, the increasing scale of P2P VoD systems has brought heavy load onto the dedicated servers. 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 the same video, that constitutes a light-weighted indexing structure to support efficient streaming and fast neighbor discovery at the same time. In-stantLeap achieves an O(1) neighbor discovery efficiency upon any playback "leaps" across the media stream in streaming overlays of any sizes, with a low messaging cost for the overlay maintenance. We support our design with rigorous analysis and extensive simulations. Copyright 2009 ACM.