Maelstream: Self-Organizing Media Streaming for Many-to-Many Interaction

A number of emerging multimedia applications, such as webinars, require users to interact by exchanging media streams. In such application there are multiple interacting participants which both produce and consume media content and a set of participants which are only consumers. Keeping the end-to-end latency as low as possible while not violating bandwidth constraints is one of the most important requirements for this type of application. While there exists solutions to this problem for applications such as multi-party video conferencing, they rely on dedicated infrastructures which may be expensive and not available to all users. On the other hand, decentralized P2P solutions have been focusing on single source media streaming, which does not consider multiple interactive participants. In this paper, we propose Maelstream, a self-organizing media streaming solution that supports multiple interacting participants as well as a large number of consumers. Maelstream uses gossip protocols to generate multiple latency-aware streaming trees on top of a P2P overlay. We have evaluated our solution with simulations implemented using Peersim and ns-3 simulators, and compared Maelstream with Chunkyspread, an unstructured protocol capable of fine-tuning latency. We show that Maelstream can achieve low end-to-end latency and scales well with the number of streams.