Stop Screaming at Me: Avoiding Duplicates in Mesh/Push-Based Live Video Streaming

BTLive is a novel, unique, mesh/push-based peer-to-peer (P2P) live video streaming mechanism. Previous studies show that it achieves significantly lower streaming delays than other approaches but suffers from a high overhead, where peers receive up to 33% duplicate video chunks. Other P2P streaming mechanisms, most of which are either mesh/pull or tree/push-based, do not experience duplicates at such a severe level. As a result, the problem of duplicate transmission has not explicitly been studied so far. However, to make BTLive's streaming approach more practical, it is critical to drastically reduce its overhead. To this end, this paper presents the design of a novel adaptive mechanism which, applied to BTLive, reduces the number of duplicates to less than 4%, while preserving its superior delivery performance. While the mechanism is applicable without changing the original BTLive protocol, also an extension to the protocol is proposed to further improve the duplicate avoidance. It reduces the amount of duplicates to less than 1%, without significantly increasing the overhead or playback delay. Thereby this work finally shows how a long envisioned low-delay and, at the same time, low-overhead P2P-based live stream delivery can be achieved.