TURINstream: A Totally pUsh, Robust, and effIcieNt P2P Video Streaming Architecture

This paper presents TURINstream, a novel P2P video streaming architecture designed to jointly achieve low delay, robustness to peer churning, limited protocol overhead, and quality-of-service differentiation based on peers cooperation. Separate control and video overlays are maintained by peers organized in clusters that represent sets of collaborating peers. Clusters are created by means of a distributed algorithm and permit the exploitation of the participant nodes upload capacity. The video is conveyed with a push mechanism by exploiting the advantages of multiple description coding. TURINstream design has been optimized through an event driven overlay simulator able to scale up to tens of thousands of peers. A complete prototype of TURINstream has been developed, deployed, and tested on PlanetLab. We tested our prototype under varying degree of peer churn, flash crowd arrivals, sudden massive departures, and limited upload bandwidth resources. TURINstream fulfills our initial design goals, showing low average connection, startup, and playback delays, high continuity index, low control overhead, and effective quality-of-service differentiation in all tested scenarios.