Saving streaming bandwidth via wireless sharing for a tree-based live streaming system on Public-Shared Network

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) based live video streaming technologies adopt mesh topology with a significant amount of streaming bandwidth consumption over the Internet backbone. This article proposes a tree-based live streaming architecture with a streaming bandwidth saving mechanism via wireless sharing technology on a Public-Shared Network (PSN). Each node of the proposed tree structure is actually an access point (FON [1]) in PSN. The wireless link among a cluster of close access points is used to deliver the streaming so that the bandwidth consumption in the Internet backbone can be reduced significantly. To construct an efficient bandwidth saving tree, two linear algorithms for FON to join to and departure from the tree, respectively, are also proposed. A prototyping of the proposed tree-based architecture with wireless sharing is also implemented to illustrate its feasibility. Experimental results indicate that compare with the tree structure without wireless sharing, the proposed mechanism saves more than 65% traffic on Internet backbone while maintaining almost the same video quality and latency.