Modeling and Performance Analysis of Pull-Based Live Streaming Schemes in Peer-to-Peer Network

TL;DR

This paper models and analyzes pull-based P2P live streaming schemes, comparing their performance with push-based schemes, and proposes an improved push-pull hybrid scheme for better streaming quality.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analytical framework for pull-based P2P streaming schemes, categorizes strategies, and introduces an effective hybrid push-pull scheme.

Findings

Pull-based schemes perform worse than push-based when reply is limited to one request.

Increasing reply number improves pull-based scheme performance.

The epidemic pull-based scheme performs poorly compared to push-based epidemic schemes.

Abstract

Recent years mesh-based Peer-to-Peer live streaming has become a promising way for service providers to offer high-quality live video streaming service to Internet users. In this paper, we make a detailed study on modeling and performance analysis of the pull-based P2P streaming systems. We establish the analytical framework for the pull-based streaming schemes in P2P network, give accurate models of the chunk selection and peer selection strategies, and organize them into three categories, i.e., the chunk first scheme, the peer first scheme and the epidemic scheme. Through numerical performance evaluation, the impacts of some important parameters, such as size of neighbor set, reply number, buffer size and so on are investigated. For the peer first and chunk first scheme, we show that the pull-based schemes do not perform as well as the push-based schemes when peers are limited to reply only one request in each time slot. When the reply number increases, the pull-based streaming schemes will reach close to optimal playout probability. As to the pull-based epidemic scheme, we find it has unexpected poor performance, which is significantly different from the push-based epidemic scheme. Therefore we propose a simple, efficient and easily deployed push-pull scheme which can significantly improve the playout probability.