DynaStream: Adaptive Overlay Management for Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming

A number of mesh-based peer-to-peer video streaming systems have been proposed, however, they have not paid careful attention to the impact of the number of data streams on streaming quality. In this paper, we first explore the effect of the choice of the number of data streams to the streaming quality. We propose a simple, practical, and fully distributed mechanism, Loss Rate Window, that maintains the overlay topology adaptive to peers' uplink bandwidth and network fluctuation. The mechanism allows each node to make an entirely local decision to adaptively control the right number of data streams to support on its uplink without explicitly knowing or measuring its uplink bandwidth. This mechanism is general, and can be applied to any kind of mesh-based peer-to-peer video streaming system to improve the quality of the video streaming service.