Mesh or Multiple-Tree: A Comparative Study of Live P2P Streaming Approaches

Existing approaches to P2P streaming can be divided into two general classes: (
i
)
tree-based approaches
use push-based content delivery over multiple tree-shaped overlays, and (
ii
)
mesh-based approaches
use swarming content delivery over a randomly connected mesh. Previous studies have often focused on a particular P2P streaming mechanism and no comparison between these two classes has been conducted. In this paper, we compare and contrast the performance of representative protocols from each class using simulations. We identify the similarities and differences between these two approaches. Furthermore, we separately examine the behavior of content delivery and overlay construction mechanisms for both approaches in static and dynamic scenarios. Our results indicate that the mesh-based approach consistently exhibits a superior performance over the tree-based approach. We also show that the main factors attributing in the inferior performance of the tree-based approach are (
i
) the static mapping of content to a particular tree, and (
ii
) the placement of each peer as an internal node in one tree and as a leaf in all other trees.