Cooperative Overlay Networking for Streaming Media Content

Media streaming has been identified as one of the most popular applications over the Internet. To enable its large-scale deployment, IP multicast represented the earlier attempt, which however failed largely due to concerns regarding scalability, deployment, and support for higher-level functionality. Another attempt includes proxy and caching techniques, which exploit the temporal locality of client requests and deploy a group of proxies to cooperatively improve the overall performance. Recently, peer-to-peer content delivery has emerged as another promising technique. We investigate various solutions proposed for peer-to-peer media streaming and divide them into two categories, tree-based and mesh-based approaches, which still may suffer inefficiencies either due to the vulnerability caused by dynamic end-hosts or the efficiency-latency tradeoff. We thus propose a novel cooperative mesh-tree design, named as mTreebone, which leverages both tree and mesh structures. Through simulations and PlanetLab experiments we demonstrate that our cooperative hybrid solution achieves superior efficiency and robustness. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.