Congestion-Distortion Optimized Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming

Abstract

In live peer-to-peer streaming, a video stream is transmitted to a large population of viewers, through the use of the uplink bandwidth of participating peers. This approach overcomes the cost of large-scale deployment of such services. An essential problem of this type of system is to limit the incurred congestion. In particular, overwhelming the uplink of some peers would create a large increase in the latency of the system and make this application less compelling. In this work we focus on limiting the congestion in a peer-to-peer network where multiple multicast trees are used to distribute video to a large set of receivers. We present the idea of congestion-distortion optimized streaming which aims at maximizing decoded video quality while limiting network congestion. We describe how this type of media scheduling maintains high video quality even for low latencies, and extend its usage to the peer-to-peer scenario. Experiments over a simulated network of 300 peers illustrate the benefits of the suggested approach.