Table Of ContentAdaptable Peer-to-Peer Internet Live Media
Streaming
Bartosz Biskupski
A thesis submitted to the University of Dublin, Trinity College
in ful(cid:28)llment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Science)
March 2009
Declaration
I, the undersigned, declare that this work has not previously been submitted to this or
any other University, and that unless otherwise stated, it is entirely my own work. I
agree that Trinity College Library may lend or copy this thesis upon request.
Bartosz Biskupski
Dated: 13th March 2009
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. RenØ Meier, for his guidance and
valuable comments to this thesis. Many thanks also to Dr. Jim Dowling for advising
me during the early stages of my PhD studies.
To amazing friends and colleagues in the Distributed Systems Group and espe-
cially to Raymond Cunningham, Serena Fritsch, Marcin Karpi«ski, Jan Sacha, As’ad
Salkham,TimWalsh,StefanWeber,andfriendsrelatedtothisgroup: SanadGharaibeh,
GosiaJaksik, JeanJoswig, forstandingbymethewholetime, forsupportwhenneeded,
and for enjoying the good times with me. Thank you all for the interesting and fun
conversations, great trips, nights out, lunches, and tea/co(cid:27)ee breaks.
To Pawe“ Garbacki, Jan Sacha and Marc Schiely for research collaboration and to
RaymondCunninghamforresearchcollaborationandproof-readingpartsofthisthesis.
To my PhD examiners, Alberto Montresor and Declan O’Sullivan, for useful com-
ments on this thesis.
To all my other friends: those in Ireland for the great time over the last four years,
those in Poland for making my each visit home much too short, and those around the
world for staying in touch.
To my Mom, my Dad, my sister Kamila, my mom-in-law Renia, and the rest of my
family and family-in-law for being the best family ever. And most of all, to my love
and wife, Ilona, for enjoying life together with me and her great patience during this
PhD journey.
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Abstract
Media streaming is an approach to delivering media, which may consist of video and
audio, from a provider to viewers. Media streaming enables simultaneous delivery and
playbackofmediaandthusprovidesanalternativetomediadownload, wheretheentire
media content has to be delivered before the playback can begin. Media streaming can
be on-demand for content archived at the provider or live for content produced at the
time of delivery.
Livemediastreamingdoesnotscalewithcurrentclient-server-basedapproachesdue
to large bandwidth and server requirements of the content provider. IP multicast has
been proposed as a network-level approach for multiple users to concurrently receive
content transmitted from the server. However, limited deployment of IP multicast
prevents pervasive use for live streaming. As a result, there is a growing interest in
application-level peer-to-peer approaches that do not require speci(cid:28)c support from the
network. Theseapproachesusebandwidthofviewers,calledpeers,toreducebandwidth
and server consumption of the content provider.
In this thesis, we present the MeshTV peer-to-peer system for live media streaming
over the Internet. MeshTV addresses limitations of existing peer-to-peer live streaming
systems that adapt poorly to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the Internet en-
vironment. MeshTV uses a mesh-based approach to peer-to-peer live media streaming.
In mesh-based approaches, every peer is connected to multiple other peers, forming
a mesh overlay. A distinguishing characteristic of a mesh overlay is that it supports
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connections between any two peers. This simpli(cid:28)es the adaptation of the overlay to
arrival and departure of peers and to (cid:29)uctuations in peer bandwidth.
MeshTV optimises the quality of media playback at participating peers. It uses a
noveldecentralisedalgorithmforadaptingthemeshoverlay. Theoverlayadaptssothat
the entire heterogeneous outgoing bandwidth of peers is utilised for media streaming.
The overlay also adapts so that all peers download media content at approximately
the same rate, unless their incoming bandwidth reduces their download rate. To adapt
the quality of media playback at a peer to the download rate of the peer, MeshTV
encodes the original media stream into multiple media descriptions. Every subset of
these descriptions can be decoded for playback and the quality of playback corresponds
to the number of descriptions being used for decoding. Peers use an algorithm to adapt
the number of downloaded descriptions to their download rate.
MeshTV furthermore enables a short delay between selecting a media for playback
and the start of the actual playback. This playback startup delay is required to bu(cid:27)er
a su(cid:30)cient amount of content to provide continuous playback in light of departure of
peers, variations in download rates and non-sequential delivery of content. A peer in
MeshTV initially delivers playback of a basic quality that allows for a short startup
delay. The quality of media playback is then gradually improved over time.
This thesis presents a comprehensive simulation analysis of MeshTV. Evaluation
results show that MeshTV adapts the overlay so that the upload rate of peers is maxi-
mised and download rates are nearly uniformamong peers. The time of thisadaptation
is short and independent of the number of peers in the overlay. The quality of playback
at peers is shown to adapt to their respective download rate. The results show that
MeshTV is resilient to highly transient population of peers. Moreover, the results show
that viewers may watch playback of a basic quality incurring only 3 seconds of startup
delay.
viii
Publications Related to this Ph.D.
• B. Biskupski, M. Schiely, P. Felber, and R. Meier. Tree-based Analysis of Mesh
Overlays for Peer-to-Peer Streaming. In 8th IFIP International Conference on
Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS’08), LNCS, Oslo, Nor-
way, June 2008.
• R.Cunningham,B.Biskupski,andR.Meier. ManagingPeer-to-PeerLiveStream-
ing Applications. In 8th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applica-
tions and Interoperable Systems (DAIS’08), LNCS, Oslo, Norway, June 2008.
• B. Biskupski, R. Cunningham, and R. Meier. Improving Throughput and Node
ProximityofP2PLiveVideoStreamingthroughOverlayAdaptation. InInterna-
tional Symposium on Multimedia (ISM’07), IEEE, Taichung, Taiwan, December
2007.
• B. Biskupski, J. Dowling, and J. Sacha. Properties and Mechanisms of Self-
Organising MANET and P2P Systems. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and
Adaptive Systems (TAAS’07), ACM Press, March 2007.
• J. Sacha, B. Biskupski, D. Dahlem, R. Cunningham, J. Dowling, and R. Meier. A
Service-Oriented Peer-to-Peer Architecture for a Digital Ecosystem. In 1st IEEE
International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (DEST’07),
IEEE, Cairns, Australia, February 2007.
• D. Dahlem, L. Nickel, J. Sacha, B. Biskupski, and R. Meier. Towards Improving
the Availability of Service Compositions. In 1st IEEE International Conference
on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (DEST’07), IEEE, Cairns, Australia,
February 2007.
• B. Biskupski, R. Cunningham, J. Dowling, R. Meier. High-Bandwidth Mesh-
based Overlay Multicast in Heterogeneous Environments. In 2nd International
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Workshop on Advanced Architectures and Algorithms for Internet Delivery and
Applications (AAA-IDEA 2006), ACM Press, Pisa, Italy, October 2006.
• D. Dahlem, D. McKitterick, L. Nickel, J. Dowling, B. Biskupski, R. Meier.
Binding- and Port-Agnostic Service Composition using a P2P SOA. In ICSOC
Workshop on Dynamic Web Processes (DWP), Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
December 2005.
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