A Study of Traffic Locality and Reliability in Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Applications

The past decade has witnessed tremendous growth of peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming applications on the Internet. For these applications, playback smoothness and timeliness are the two most important aspects of users’ viewing experiences, whereas the amount of traffic is Internet service providers’ main concern. According to the playback delay, video streaming can be classified into on-demand streaming, live streaming, and interactive streaming. P2P live streaming applications typically have an arbitrary number of users, tens of seconds of playback delay, and a high packet delivery rate, but their heavy traffic incurs great financial expenditure and threatens the quality of other services. Interactive streaming applications usually have a small group size, several hundreds of milliseconds of playback delay, and reasonable traffic volume, but cannot achieve a high packet delivery rate. The goal of this thesis is to study traffic locality and reliable delivery of packets in large-scale live streaming and small-scale interactive streaming applications, while keeping the playback delay well below the targeted applications’ limits. For P2P live streaming applications, we first identify “typical” schemes from existing P2P live streaming schemes, investigate packet propagation behavior and the impact of neighboring strategies on system performance, and then propose innovative