CSLive: A Live Streaming Overlay with Cooperative Swarming

Peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming systems gain a lot of attention recently. Among the various architectures, the gossip-based approach holds great potential and has been used in real systems. In a gossip-based P2P streaming system, peer nodes are grouped together to exchange pieces of the live stream with each other. Maintaining the group and pulling the streaming data from other peers incur nontrivial overhead. This paper proposes CSLive, a P2P streaming system which gathers nodes that have good network proximity into clusters and lets nodes in the same cluster cooperate with each other to pull the stream. Each node in the cluster is responsible for pulling a subset of the stream, while pushing the subset to other nodes in the cluster. With the cooperative operations, a node can receive most streaming data from other nodes in the same cluster, which have good communication quality. The proposed system is evaluated with simulation.