A Cloud-Assisted Tree-Based P2P System for Low Latency Streaming

Live media streaming applications are increasingly popular, with services such as Twitch.tv and YouNow being used by millions of people. Deploying such services on the cloud can be very expensive, as the cost is proportional to the amount of data transferred to the users. However, adopting a much less costly peer-to-peer (P2P) solution may reduce the overall quality-of-service (QoS) experienced by users, since there are no guarantees regarding resource availability. Therefore, hybrid P2P/Cloud solutions have been proposed to reduce the cost of using a cloud infrastructure while still providing QoS guarantees. Most existing P2P/cloud streaming solutions apply a pull-based data dissemination mechanism, and use the cloud to ensure that all users receive the data before playback deadline. Although push-based streaming trees can reduce the overall dissemination latency, they have been overlooked in these settings since they are less robust to user churn. In this paper we present a cloud-assisted P2P solution that is self-organizing, robust to user churn and leverages streaming trees to push data to users with low latency. We show through extensive simulations that the proposed solution can reduce playback latency considerably when compared to an alternative pull-based system, without compromising QoS or increasing the cost.