Managing Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming Applications

Abstract

A number of p2p live streaming systems [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] and [7] have been proposed in recent years. Typically, the description of these systems focuses on how the live stream is transmitted from its source to a number of viewers within the particular p2p network and how these systems deal with the failure of one or more viewers during transmission of the stream. An important aspect of each of these sys- tems that is typically overlooked is how individual stream transmitters and viewers of these streams are managed in terms of registration, con- figuration and maintenance. In this paper, a set of management related abstractions common to many p2p live streaming systems are identified. This paper describes the MeshTV architecture, capturing these abstrac- tions, to simplify the management of p2p live streaming applications. The architecture has been evaluated through a number of experiments and has been assessed against existing related work.