Comparison of data replication strategies for peer-to-peer video streaming

Abstract

Current peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems are mostly optimized for file availability. This paper investigates P2P architecture for video streaming in general, and the performance impact of data redundancy schemes in particular. In particular, this work show that maximizing file availability is not the best strategy for video streaming as another constraint-peers' streaming bandwidth, comes into play. To address this limitation, a request-rate minimization policy is developed and evaluated using simulation. The resultant optimized replication strategy is then compared to data redundancy scheme based on erasure-correction coding. Simulation results show that with sufficient peer storage and a low erasure coding overhead, erasure-correction coding can achieve substantially better streaming performance than replication-based strategies.