Bottom-up trie structure for P2P live streaming

Abstract

By simultaneously providing live video and audio contents to millions of users around the world, peer-to-peer live video streaming (P2P LVS) has become one of the most popular Internet applications in recent years. However, current P2P LVS software has problems such as non-smooth playback and long start-up delay for end users. To address these issues, we design a P2P-based multi-bit Trie structure, called Bottom-Up Trie (BU-Trie), for distributing P2P live contents. Different from other approaches, BU-Trie is a Trie formed and built inversely from leaf nodes (or child nodes) back to the root node (or parent node). This architecture consists of two phases: a diffusion phase and a swarming phase. The main design goal of the diffusion phase is to group the local peers together by discovering physical locations of peers, and design the paths for fast distributing live streams from the source node to end users. The objective of the swarming phase is to find an optimal way for exchanging the video stream chunks within a local group. We propose an algorithm called Most Popular Chunk First (MPCF) and apply it for the swarming phase for efficient chunk exchange. Performance evaluation of the proposed BU-Trie shows that, when compared to other approaches, the sequential throughput of video chunks is increased. The inter-domain traffic, the traffic between different Internet service providers (ISPs), is reduced as well. Such a reduction would benefit carriers economically.