Construction of an efficient ring-tree-based Peer-to-Peer streaming platform

Although application layer multicast (ALM) has attracted much attention in transmitting multimedia, it has a serious problem: the multicast tree is fragile and a peer failure will cause tree partitions. This work proposes the novel Hierarchical Ring Tree (HRT) architecture for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live multimedia streaming by combining the ring-based and tree-based structures. When a peer logs on or off the system, the topology is recovered rapidly, allowing live multimedia streaming to deliver smoothly at low latency. This architecture is constructed and maintained efficiently without tree splitting or merging. The performance of the approach is evaluated over the PlanetLab network. Experimental results indicate that the HRT approach achieves a good overlay performance in terms of data loss rate, end-to-end delay, and effectively reduces the overheads.