Stream Switching Resilience in P2P Streaming

Abstract

Peer-to-peer media streaming is a scalable way to multicast real-time contents toward a large number of peers. In multi-stream streaming systems such as P2PTV, peers continuously switch between media streams at a high rate. This leads to data loss, data propagation delay, and overlay reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to make a multi-stream peer-to-peer media streaming system resilient to stream switching. This mechanism theoretically limits overlay switching rate and synchronizes overlay departures/joins. Our simulation experiment show the mechanism effectively prevents the delay and loss penalties caused by stream switching.