Multi-Source Scheduling in Streaming Erasure-Coded Video over P2P Networks

The efficient scheduling of streaming data delivery in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network is a hard problem due to the Internet's lack of support for resource allocation and performance guarantees. In particular, the bandwidth resources available to a peer is constantly in flux and the future bandwidth availability is very difficult, if not impossible, to predict accurately. This work proposes to tackle this problem from a different angle. We investigate the use of erasure codes to encode the media data and then schedule multiple peers to stream the encoded data simultaneously to a receiver. By exploiting the order-invariant property of erasure codes this approach enables the sending peers to fully utilize their available bandwidth resources and yet does not need to estimate or predict their bandwidth availability. Moreover, we develop distributed scheduling algorithms to juxtapose the data transmissions from multiple peers so that the coding and storage complexities can be kept at practical level in scaling up the system. This paper describes the motivation, architecture, and design of the proposed coding/scheduling algorithms; develops a performance model to characterize the algorithms' performance bounds; and evaluates them through simulation as well as experiments.