Efficient push-based packet scheduling for Peer-to-Peer live streaming

Content scheduling is a key component of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The problem is how to schedule the content delivery to the children peers with multiple parents to improve the overall performance of the systems. The challenge is to design a scheme with low delay and low bandwidth utilization. Most of recent works propose pull-based schemes, whose processes for periodically advertising and requesting on per-packet basic lead to long delay. However, long playback delay is undesirable for live streaming and TV shows. In this paper, we formulate the scheduling problems as to minimize the playback delay due to scheduling. To solve the problem and address the packet redundancy and disorder packet arrival issues, we propose a novel push-based scheme. In our scheme, parents push packets to their children in a given interval pattern as soon as the packets are received, and children feed back network condition changes with an interval pattern when necessary. The scheme eliminates the processes of buffer advertising and packet requesting, and reduces control traffic, delivery delay and playback delay much more than the pull-based schemes. We provide an efficient scheduling algorithm and its implementation for simulation. The simulation results show that our scheme outperforms other pull-based schemes significantly.