Flash Crowd in peer-to-peer (P2P) Live Streaming System: Characterization and Control

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Flash Crowd in peer-to-peer (P2P) Live Streaming System:
Characterization and Control"

By

Miss Lili ZHONG


Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming systems have recently received 
significant attention, with commercial deployment gaining increased 
popularity in the Internet. It is evident from our experiences with 
real-world systems that, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands 
of users trying to join a program in the first few minutes of a live 
broadcast. This phenomenon in streaming systems, referred to as the flash 
crowd, poses unique challenges in the system design. In this thesis, we 
first characterizing impact of various neighbor size, namely the number of 
neighbors of each peer, which is usually suspected to be a determining 
factor for performance fluctuation during flash crowds. However, our 
analytical results shows the surprising result that resilience to flash 
crowds benefits little from increasing the neighbor size beyond a small 
threshold (typically 5).

We then propose a population control strategy to alleviate the flash 
crowds. In particular, we show that there is a fundamental upper bound on 
the system scale with respect to a time constraint. By trading peer 
startup delays in the initial stage of a flash crowd for system scale, we 
design a simple and flexible population control framework with theoretical 
insights and practical guidelines. Our theoretical and numerical analysis 
verifies that an appropriate population control scheme do help alleviate 
the performance fluctuation during flash crowds. In addition, our analysis 
has brought forth an in-depth understanding on effects of the gossip 
protocol and peer churn.


Date:			Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Time:			5:00pm – 7:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Bo Li (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Qian Zhang (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen


**** ALL are Welcome ****