Understanding the Power of Pull-Based Streaming Protocol: Can We Do Better?

13 years 10 months ago

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— Most of the real deployed peer-to-peer streaming systems adopt pull-based streaming protocol. In this paper, we demonstrate that, besides simplicity and robustness, with proper parameter settings, when the server bandwidth is above several times of the raw streaming rate, which is reasonable for practical live streaming system, simple pull-based P2P streaming protocol is nearly optimal in terms of peer upload capacity utilization and system throughput even without intelligent scheduling and bandwidth measurement. We also indicate that whether this near optimality can be achieved depends on the parameters in pull-based protocol, server bandwidth and group size. Then we present our mathematical analysis to gain deeper insight in this characteristic of pull-based streaming protocol. On the other hand, the optimality of pull-based protocol comes from a cost tradeoff between control overhead and delay, that is, the protocol has either large control overhead or large delay. To break the ...

Meng Zhang, Qian Zhang, Lifeng Sun, Shiqiang Yang

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