Efficient P2P video distribution by peer reorganization

Abstract

There are two types of P2P systems satisfying two different user demands: (a) file downloading and (b) VoD streaming. Example of (a) is the original BitTorrent, and examples for (b) including various commercial P2P-based VoD streaming systems such as that offered by PPLive. We have a hypothesis - by combining a type (a) system and a type (b) system as a single P2P system, both the file downloading users and the streaming users of the same video will benefit in performance. The reasoning is that at any moment, only a subset of the file downloading peers can provide good service to VoD streaming peers and the VoD streaming peers are only good at providing service to a different subset of the file downloading peers. The former subset is the set of peers close to completing downloading the video file; whereas the latter subset is the set of peers starting to download a video. In this paper, we propose a novel design for a mesh-based video distribution system without depending on peer storage. We produce simple back-of-the-envelop analysis, and use simulation to validate our design and compare with other designs.