PRIME: P2P Receiver-drIven MEsh-based Streaming
Nazanin Magharei
Directed Research Project(Jun 2006)
Keywords: P2P; Streaming; Video; Swarming

Multimedia services based on Peer-to-Peer live streaming such as IPTV, are getting increasingly popular among users specially with improvement of network bandwidth. The goal of these mechanisms is to maximize the delivered quality to individual peers with minimum buffer requirement in a scalable fashion. However existing P2P streaming schemes can not achieve this goal due to their inability to utilize available resources. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of a novel approach to live media streaming over P2P mesh-based overlay, called P2P Receiver-drIven-MEsh-based streaming or PRIME. In PRIME participating peers form a randomly connected and directed overlay mesh and incorporate a swarm-like content delivery to effectively contribute their outgoing bandwidth. We explore the design space of mesh-based P2P streaming mechanisms through PRIME which provides an insight on fundamental tradeoffs in design of mesh-based P2P streaming mechanisms. In particular, through extensive simulations we illustrate the effect of overlay properties, source behavior, per-peer packet scheduling and peer populations on system performance. Our evaluations show that PRIME can effectively provides high quality live P2P streaming to a large number of peers with minimum buffer requirement, without imposing an additional bandwidth requirement to source.