An Optimal Server Selection Algorithm for P2P IPTV over Fiber to the Node (FTTN) Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the issue of server selection for P2P IPTV system on fiber to the node networks. To achieve high performance and resilience to failures, a peer can make connections with multiple peers simultaneously and receive different portions of the data in parallel. Prior work mostly focuses on user-centric performance objectives, such as reducing the round-trip time or the completion time of individual download, but tend to ignore the congestion caused by the concurrent connections or the network load balance. The latter performance concerns are important for the network operators who provide and manage IPTV services. In this paper, we consider two performance metrics, the worst-case link stress (WLS) and the degree of interference (DOI), and present a server selection scheme that generates the optimal server set with respect to the WLS criterion. Through experiments on PlanetLab, we show that the proposed scheme has the advantages over the random scheme and the closest scheme in the following aspects. First, it minimizes the level of congestion at the bottleneck link. Second, it consumes less network resources in terms of the total bandwidth usage. Third, the network load is well balanced.