Segment Tree Based Control Plane Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Streaming Service Discovery

As the intense academic interest in video streaming over peer-to-peer(P2P) network, more and more streaming protocols have been proposed to address different problems on this field, such as QoS, load balancing, transmission reliability, bandwidth efficiency, etc. However, to the best of our knowledge, an important component of any practical P2P streaming system, the streaming service discovery, is rarely granted particular considerations, which is to discover potential peers from which a newcomer could receive the requested stream. In this paper, we are inspired from a special data structure, named Segment Tree(ST), and propose a protocol to address this problem specifically. Furthermore, we fully decouple the control plane and data plane on video streaming, and hence provide more flexibilities in designing protocols on both of them.