Abstract

Though plenty of research has been conducted to improve Internet P2P
streaming quality perceived by endusers, little has been known about
the upper bounds of achievable performance with available resources so
that different designs could compare against. On the other hand, the
current practice has shown increasing demand of server capacities in
P2P-assisted streaming systems in order to maintain high-quality
streaming to end-users. Both research and practice call for a design
that can optimally utilize available peer resources. In the paper, we
first present a new design, aiming to reveal the best achievable
throughput for heterogeneous P2P streaming systems. We measure the
performance gaps between various designs and this optimal resource
allocation. Through extensive simulations, we find out that several
typical existing designs have not fully exploited the potential of
system resources. However, the control overhead prohibits the adoption
of this optimal approach. Then, we design a hybrid system in trading
off the cost of assignment and utilization of resources. This hybrid
approach has a proved theoretical bound on efficiency of
utilization. Simulation results show that compared with the optimal
resource allocation, our proposed hybrid design can achieve
near-optimal (up to 90%) utilization while only use much less (below
4%) control overhead. Our results provide a basis for both server
capacity planning in current P2Passisted streaming practice and future
protocol designs.


Speaker Bio

Dongyu Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in Dept. of Computer Science at George
Mason University. His research interests are in the areas of
networking and systems, particular on Internet streaming delivery and
QoS.