Distributed Rate Allocation in P2P Streaming

In peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming, each peer contributes its upload bandwidth to redistributing the data stream to its downstream peers. How to optimally utilize the upload bandwidth of each peer is an important issue. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed algorithm to optimize the link rate allocation in P2P streaming. We use dual decomposition to separate the optimization problem into multiple sub-problems, which are solved at each individual peer respectively. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed rate allocation scheme can quickly converge, and achieve a higher throughput compared to proportional or equal allocation scheme.