Inferring Network-Wide Quality in P2P Live Streaming Systems

—This paper explores how to remotely monitor network-wide quality in mesh-pull P2P live streaming systems. Peers in such systems advertise to each other buffer maps which summarize the chunks of data that they currently have cached and make available for sharing. We show how buffer maps can be exploited to monitor network-wide quality. We show that information provided in a peer’s advertised buffer map correlates to that peer’s viewing-continuity and startup latency. Given this correlation, we can remotely harvest buffer maps from many peers and then process the harvested buffer maps to estimate ongoing quality. After having developed this methodology, we apply it to a popular P2P live streaming system, namely, PPLive. To harvest buffer maps, we build a buffer-map crawler and also deploy passive sniffing nodes. We process the harvested buffer maps and present results for network-wide playback continuity, startup latency, playback lags among peers, and chunk propagation. The resu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JSAC
• Authors: Xiaojun Hei, Yong Liu, Keith W. Ross
• Keywords: Buffer Maps, JSAC 2007, Live Streaming, Network-wide Quality