Towards a Trustworthy and Controllable Peer-Server-Peer Media Streaming: An Analytical Study and An Industrial Perspective

Peer-to-peer technology gives novel opportunities to define a cost-effective multimedia streaming application, but at the same time, it brings a set of technical challenges due to its dynamic and heterogeneous nature. To guarantee QoS and facilitate management in large scale high-performance media streaming, we extend the current P2P networking towards a novel Peer-Server-Peer (PSP) architecture for media streaming, in which carefully-deployed servers form a trustworthy and controllable overlay network to stream P2P cluster peers. An analytical model is presented to calculate the quality of experience (QoE) and mapping QoS parameters to prove the effectiveness of Peer-Server-Peer streaming. Joint with the efforts in industry, we explore the feasibility of PSP streaming in the historical context of "demand economy" for media streaming and "best effort" Internet. The value of this paper lies not in its analytical study of this promising PSP concept with practical implementation but also its insight industrial perspective to attract further application.