Understanding the Performance Gap Between Pull-Based Mesh Streaming Protocols and Fundamental Limits

—Pull-based mesh streaming protocols have recently received much research attention, with successful commercial systems showing their viability in the Internet. Despite the remarkable popularity in real-world systems, the fundamental properties and limitations of pull-based protocols are not yet well understood from a theoretical perspective, as there exists no prior work that studies the performance gap between the fundamental limits and the actual performance. In this paper, we develop a unified framework based on trellis graph techniques to mathematically analyze and understand the performance of pull-based mesh streaming protocols, with a particular focus on such a performance gap. We show that there exists a significant performance gap that separates the actual and optimal performance of pull-based mesh protocols. Moreover, periodic buffer map exchanges account for most of this performance gap. Our analytical characterization of the performance gap brings us not only a better ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Chen Feng, Baochun Li, Bo Li
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2009, Mesh Streaming Protocols, Performance Gap, Pull-based Mesh