Characterizing user behavior to improve quality of streaming service over P2P networks

Abstract

The universal recognition that it is critical to improve the performance of existing systems and protocols with the understanding to practical service experiences motivates us to discuss this issue in the context of peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming. With the benefit of both practical traces from traditional client-server (C/S) service systems and logs from P2P live broadcasting system, in this paper we first characterize end user behaviors in terms of online duration and reveal the statistically positive correlation between elapsed online duration and expected remaining online time. Then we explore the feasibility to improve the quality of streaming service over P2P networks by proposing Low Disruption Tree Construction (LDTC) algorithm to take the online duration information into account when peers self-organize into the service overlay. The experiment results show that LDTC could achieve higher stability of video date delivery tree and in turn improve the quality of streaming service. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.