Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming mechanisms support one-to-many delivery of streaming content without any especial support from the network. The goal of these mechanisms is to maximize delivered quality to individual peers with minimum buffer requirement at each peer in a scalable fashion. However, existing P2P streaming schemes can not achieve this goal because of their inability to effectively utilize the outgoing bandwidth of participating peers.

This paper presents a new approach to live P2P streaming, called P2P Receiver-drIven MEsh-based Streaming, or PRIME. In PRIME, participating peers form a randomly connected and directed mesh-based overlay and incorporate a swarm-like delivery to effectively contribute their outgoing bandwidth. We present the design of PRIME and conduct detailed simulation-based evaluations. In particular, we illustrate the effect of per-peer packet scheduling, overlay properties, source behavior and peer population on system performance. Our evaluations shed an insightful light on fundamental tradeoffs in design of mesh-based P2P streaming mechanisms.