Efficient Algorithms for Multi-Sender Data Transmission in Swarm-Based Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems

In mesh-based peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems, each video sequence is divided into segments, which are then streamed from multiple senders to a receiver. The receiver needs to coordinate the senders by specifying a transmission schedule for each of them. We consider the problem of scheduling segment transmission in P2P streaming systems, where different segments have different weights in terms of quality improvements to the received video. Our goal is to compute the transmission schedule for each receiver in order to maximize the perceived video quality. We first show that this scheduling problem is NP-Complete. We then present an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation for it, so that it can be solved with any ILP solver. This optimal solution, however, is computationally expensive and is not suitable for real-time P2P streaming systems. Thus, we propose two approximation algorithms to solve this segment scheduling problem. These algorithms provide theoretical guarantees on the worst-case performance. The first algorithm considers the weight of each video segment. The second algorithm is simpler and it assumes that segments carry equal weights. We analyze the performance and complexity of the two algorithms. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the proposed algorithms with simulations and experiments using a prototype implementation. Our simulation and experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform other algorithms that are commonly used in deployed P2P streaming systems and that have been recently proposed in the literature.