An Experimental Distributed Protocol to Serve Dynamic Groups for Peer-to-Peer Streaming

Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming has been widely deployed over the Internet. A streaming system usually has multiple channels, and peers may form multiple groups for content distribution. In this paper, we propose a distributed overlay framework (called SMesh) for dynamic groups where users may frequently hop from one group to another while the total pool of users remain stable. SMesh first builds a relatively stable mesh consisting of all hosts for control messaging. The mesh supports dynamic host joining and leaving, and will guide the construction of delivery trees. Using the Delaunay Triangulation (DT) protocol as an example, we show how to construct an efficient mesh with low maintenance cost. We further study various tree construction mechanisms based on the mesh, including embedded, bypass, and intermediate trees. Through simulations on Internet-like topologies, we show that SMesh achieves low delay and low link stress.