Delay Management in Mesh-Based P2P Live Streaming Using a Three-Stage Peer Selection Strategy

Peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming systems have gained popularity due to the self-scalability property of the P2P overlay networks. In P2P live streaming, peers retrieve stream content from other peers in the system. Therefore, peer selection strategy is a fundamental element to build an overlay which manages the playback delay and startup delay experienced by the peers. In this paper, we propose a peer selection strategy which manages to build a minimum delay overlay using three different stages of overlay construction. In the first stage, the tracker suggests some peers as prospective partners to a new peer. In the second stage, the peer selects its partners out of these peers such that delay is minimized. The third stage is the topology adaptation phase of peers, where peers reposition themselves in the overlay to maintain minimum delay during peer churn. In the proposed peer selection strategy, peers are selected in all the stages based on parameters such as propagation delay, upload capacity, buffering duration and buffering level. The proposed strategy is compared with two existing strategies in the literature: Fast-Mesh (Ren et al. in IEEE Trans Multimed 11: 1446, 2009) and Hybrid live p2p streaming protocol (Hammami et al., 2014) using simulations. Our results show that playback delay and startup delay are reduced significantly with the help of proposed strategy. We demonstrate that the stability of the system also improves during peer churn.