Scalable media streaming in large peer-to-peer networks

We design a peer-to-peer technique for single-source media streaming. This technique allows the media server to distribute content to many clients by organizing them into an appropriate tree rooted at the server. This application-layer multicast tree has a height O(logN) where N is the number of clients, and a node degree bounded by a constant. This helps reduce the number of processing hops on the delivery path to a client while avoiding network bottleneck. Consequently, the end-to-end delay is kept small. Although one could build a tree satisfying such properties easily, an efficient control protocol between the nodes must be in place to maintain the tree under the effects of network dynamics and unpredictable client behaviors. Our technique handles such situations gracefully requiring a constant amortized control overhead. Especially, failure recovery can be done regionally with little impact on the existing clients.