Robust Scheduling of Video Streams in Network-Aware P2P Applications

P2P TV and video streaming are among the most bandwidth-hungry applications running over the Internet. One of the main reasons is that the scheduling of information transfer between peers is extremely aggressive and does not take network characteristics into account. Moreover, schedulers are not designed to be robust and configurable, so that their performance is greatly affected by networking conditions. This work first analyzes the impact of network heterogeneity on the streaming performance and then proposes a novel, robust, configurable, network-aware scheduler that outperforms the other schedulers in all networking scenarios.