Differenciated Bandwidth Allocation in P2P Layered Streaming
This addresses bandwidth inefficiency for P2P streaming users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing auction mechanisms for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of bandwidth allocation in P2P layered video streaming, where missing lower layers degrade throughput, by proposing an auction-based model to optimize upload bandwidth allocation, showing effectiveness in improving user and network utility through theoretical and performance evaluations.
There is an increasing demand for P2P streaming in particular for layered video. In this category of applications, the stream is composed of hierarchically encoded sub-streams layers namely the base layer and enhancements layers. We consider a scenario where the receiver peer uses the pull-based approach to adjust the video quality level to their capability by subscribing to different number of layers. We note that higher layers received without their corresponding lower layers are considered as useless and cannot be played, consequently the throughput of the system will drastically degrade. To avoid this situation, we propose an economical model based on auction mechanisms to optimize the allocation of sender peers' upload bandwidth. The upstream peers organize auctions to "sell" theirs items (links' bandwidth) according to bids submitted by the downstream peers taking into consideration the peers priorities and the requested layers importance. The ultimate goal is to satisfy the quality level requirement for each peer, while reducing the overall streaming cost. Through theoretical study and performance evaluation we show the effectiveness of our model in terms of users and network's utility.