Outreach: peer-to-peer topology construction towards minimized server bandwidth costs

Abstract— On-demand and live multimedia streaming applications (such as Internet TV) are well known to utilize a significant amount of bandwidth from media streaming servers, especially as the number of participating peers in the streaming session scales up. To scale to higher bit rates of media streams and larger numbers of participating peers, overlay tree or mesh topologies are typically constructed, such that peers utilize their available upload capacities to alleviate the excessive bandwidth demands on stream servers. Previous works rely on random selections of upstream peers, without optimizing the topologies towards maximized utilization of peer upload bandwidth, and as a result, minimized bandwidth costs on streaming servers. We propose Outreach, a distributed algorithm to construct overlay topologies among participating peers in streaming sessions. The design objective of Outreach is to optimize the quality of overlay topologies towards scalability, with respect to the numb...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JSAC
• Authors: Tara Small, Baochun Li, Ben Liang
• Keywords: JSAC 2007, Topologies, Upload Bandwidth, Upload Capacities