Exploring the optimal chunk selection policy for data-driven P2P streaming systems

Abstract

Data-driven P2P streaming systems can potentially provide good playback rate to a large number of viewers. One important design problem in such P2P systems is to determine the optimal chunk selection policy that provides high continuity playback under the server's upload capacity constraint. We present a general and unified mathematical framework to analyze a large class of chunk selection policies. The analytical framework is asymptotically exact when the number of viewers is large. More importantly, we provide some interesting observations on the optimal chunk selection policy: it is of shaped and becomesmore greedy as the upload capacity of the server increases. This insight helps content providers to deploy large scale streaming systems with a QoS-guarantee under a given cost constraint.