Issues in Offering Live P2P Streaming Service to Residential Users

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming mechanism is a promising approach to offer one-to-many distribution of live streaming content to large number of residential users across the Internet. While a few P2P streaming mechanisms have been recently proposed, the behavior of these mechanisms in sessions where a large fraction of uasers are residential peers have not been examined. Several characteristics of residential users could affect the behavior of P2P streaming sessions including (i) the heterogeneity of access link bandwidth, (ii) the limitation of available resources due to asymmetric nature of access link bandwidth (for DSL and cable modem), and (iii) the participation of free-loaders. In this paper, we examine the effect of these three character- istics of residential users on the performance of P2P streaming mechanisms using ns simulations. We show that these character- istics could adversely affect the performance of P2P streaming mechanisms as follows. First, the delivered quality to individual users is not correlated with their contributed resource to the system. Second, the presence of free-loaders could dramatically degrade the delivered quality to participating peers even when the amount of available resources in the system are adequate. Our findings suggest that P2P streaming has to address these issues in order to be successfully deployed among residential users.