Striking the Balance between Content Diversity and Content Importance in Swarm-Based P2P Streaming System

During recent years, the success of live swarm-based P2P streaming system has been witnessed. Nevertheless, how to design an effective mechanism in mitigating video quality degradation in a lossy network environment is still not thoroughly resolved yet. Unlike conventional client-server paradigm, there is data availability problem in swarm-based P2P streaming system. If we directly conduct the importance-first scheduling strategy (i.e. let the chunks with most distortion-rate efficiency get scheduled first) in swarm-based P2P streaming system, the serious content bottleneck for low priority chunks occurs, particularly when the population size is large. In this paper, we first identify the unique problem and understand the rationale behind. After that, a dynamic strategy-switching approach that combines the advantages of random and importance-first scheduling strategy is proposed. Simulation results indicate that compared with existing approaches our approach not only provides better scheduling efficiency, but also is scalable even if population size is large.