On meeting P2P streaming bandwidth demand with limited supplies

Abstract

As a basic requirement of live peer-to-peer multimedia streaming sessions, the streaming playback rate needs to be strictly enforced at each of the peers. In real-world peer-to-peer streaming sessions with very large scales, the number of streaming servers for each session may not be easily increased, leading to a limited supply of bandwidth. To scale to a large number of peers, one prefers to regulate the bandwidth usage on each of the overlay links in an optimal fashion, such that limited supplies of bandwidth may be maximally utilized. In this paper, we propose a decentralized bandwidth allocation algorithm that can be practically implemented in peer-to-peer streaming sessions. Given a mesh P2P topology, our algorithm explicitly reorganizes the bandwidth of data transmission on each overlay link, such that the streaming bandwidth demand is always guaranteed to be met at any peer in the session, without depending on any a priori knowledge of available peer upload or overlay link bandwidth. Our algorithm is especially useful when there exists no or little surplus bandwidth supply from servers or other peers. It adapts well to time-varying availability of bandwidth, and guarantees bandwidth supply for the existing peers during volatile peer dynamics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with in-depth simulation studies. © 2008 SPIE-IS&T.