A bottom-up approach to peer-to-peer live multicast

Abstract

The implementation difficulty of IP multicast in terms of both structural and economical reasons, headed the multicast functionality towards higher layers. Peerto- peer multicasting have aroused as a potential solution for these services and it has established a presence in the market rapidly. However, it came with several challenging design and deployment issues, and unresolved problems. One of the key concerns of P2P protocol designing is the overlay construction phase. However, neither tree based systems nor mesh based systems are robust enough to provide a resilient and efficient service. In this study, we propose a new overlay topology for P2P multicasting to eliminate the problems caused by the best effort nature of the Internet infrastructure and unpredictable behavior of peers. In this approach, we are handling the tree based architecture of P2P live video streaming with a bottom-up perspective. By allowing reverse transmission of video packets, i.e., packet transmission from descendants through ascendants, the disruptions caused by the packet losses and peer churn are effectively reduced. By implementing the proposed method, we consistently achieved better video quality than a well known tree based P2P protocol (SPPM), notably in the cases of high packet loss ratio and peer churn.