StreamComplete: An Architecture for Mesh-Based Peer-to-Peer Live Video Streaming

The increasing of bandwidth capacity and the rising of more active and more demanding Internet users motivate the research of the best solution in P2P multimedia streaming. This paper presents STREAM COMPLETE, a new architecture and prototype system for mesh-based P2P live video streaming; it realizes a new concept of overlay network's management as well as merges the best practices of tree- and mesh-based approaches. STREAM COMPLETE creates a dynamic overlay network that optimizes itself basing on local conditions of peers. The two core operations are: (i) FastTop, that reorganizes peers in order to improve the general performance of the network; (ii) LoopCheck, that detects bounded loops of the multimedia streaming in the mesh overlay network. We have extensively evaluated the performance and the behavior of STREAM COMPLETE over the Planet Lab. Our experiments demonstrate the ability of peers in managing the overlay network with autonomic behavior in case of network changes. Furthermore the system is scalable w.r.t. the cardinality of the overlay network, by requiring very few control traffic.