Two-tier peer selection strategy to minimize delay in P2P live streaming systems

Abstract

The increase in popularity of online video streaming services and the self-scalability property of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays contributed to the development of P2P live streaming systems. In these systems, peers connect with each other to retrieve video content. The store-and-forward strategy to distribute stream induces forwarding delay at each hop from the source to a peer. Therefore, designing peer selection strategy to minimize end-to-end delay is an important research problem in P2P live streaming systems. In this paper, we develop a two-tier peer selection strategy which minimizes playback lag and startup delay. In the proposed two-tier peer selection strategy, peers are selected at both the levels (tracker and peer) based on propagation delay, upload capacity, playback lag and buffering level. The proposed two-tier peer selection strategy is compared with an existing system, Fast-Mesh using simulations. The results show that playback lag is reduced by 20-25% and startup delay is reduced by 10-15%.