Comprehensive study of buffering mechanisms in hybrid live P2P streaming protocol HLPSP

Buffering mechanisms play a vital role in leveraging the capacity and efficiency of live streaming as well as P2P streaming system. An appropriate buffering mechanism allows the peer to undergo a smooth playback by compensating the delay introduced by the network as well as storing pieces to be played in the near future. A circular buffer is used most of the time in a live P2P streaming system as the media duration is not known in advance. When the speed of the downloading process exceeds the speed of the playback process, some not-yet-played pieces my be erased which affects in turn the playback quality. In this paper we investigate this problem through extensive simulations done without loss of generality in the context of our recently proposed P2P protocol named HLPSP and we propose a pieces requesting control mechanism to avoid such a problem. The simulations results show that the proposed mechanism eliminates the erasing phenomena which decreases the rate of the missed pieces during the playback process.