A fine-grained balancing scheme for improved scalability in P2P streaming

In this paper, we relax the restriction imposed in our previously proposed balancing scheme that a peer is allowed to forward only one specific description to others, and propose the fine-grained balancing scheme to further improve the scalability of P2P live streaming systems based on multiple description coding (MDC) techniques. Like the balancing scheme, the fine-grained balancing scheme is capable of balancing the distribution of descriptions and streaming workload among peers by means of a centralized description allocation scheme. Moreover, relaxing the restriction on peers' description provision enables the proposed fine-grained balancing scheme to utilize peers' outbound bandwidth more flexibly and efficiently than the balancing scheme. The experiment results show that with the proposed scheme the utilization of peers' bandwidth can be greatly improved, thereby reducing the server bandwidth consumption and the rejection rate. As a result, more peers can be served and peers are enabled to recover from failure mostly by themselves with little server involvement.