Playback Delay in Mesh-Based Peer-to-Peer Systems with Random Packet Forwarding

In meshed-based peer-to-peer streaming systems peers forward packets to their neighbors based on local scheduling decisions. The local decisions affect how packets get distributed in the mesh, the probability of duplicates and the distribution of the transmission delays. In this paper we propose an analytic framework that allows the evaluation of various scheduling algorithms. We consider two solutions where scheduling is performed at the forwarding peer, based on the knowledge of the playout buffer content at the neighbors. We evaluate the effectiveness of the solutions in terms of the probability that a peer can play out a packet versus the playback delay, and the scalability of the solutions with respect to the size of the overlay.