Resource and locality awareness in an incentive-based P2P live streaming system

Abstract

One of the main challenges in P2P live streaming is the efficient allocation of the available resources. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the effects of a local pairwise incentive mechanism applied to an unstructured mesh-based architecture. We focus on the relationship between resource availability in the system and the average quality of its data distribution paths, both in terms of bandwidth efficiency and awareness to network locality. We show via large scale testbed experiments based on the PULSE live streaming system that the introduction of appropriate incentive-based policies as the main peer selection mechanism can lead to a global content distribution mesh which has properties similar to tree-based structured systems. © 2007 ACM.