The Large Scale Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Live Streamming in the Internet

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "The Large Scale Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Live Streamming in the Internet"

By

Mr. Susu Xie


Abstract

A large number of emerging applications such as IPTV, event broadcast,
online games and distance learning require the support of live video
streaming, yet, this is perhaps the greatest unfulfilled promise of the
Internet. The root of the problem is that the Internet by nature, i.e.,
autonomous, heterogeneous, best-effort, can not provide the services
required by streaming applications. The recent development in Peer-to-Peer
(P2P) technologies brings new momentum in live video streaming due to the
inherent self-scaling property and easy deployment. In spite of its
popularity, there is no consensus on how a large-scale P2P live streaming
system works. There are two fundamental problems in the design space:
topology formulation that relates to how a peer locates the video content
from one another and content delivery. Further, there has been little
study on the design tradeoffs and large-scale measurements. This thesis
fills this gap.

We leverage our earlier system, Coolstreaming, which was arguably the
earliest large-scale P2P video streaming experiment and was widely
referenced in the community as the benchmark (Google entries top 400,000).
We design and implemente comprehensive logging tools to collect and
analyze large sets of traces from real-world broadcasts, from which we
establish a theoretical framework that (1) concretely demonstrate the
fundamental system design trade-offs and further identify the main
performance bottlenecks and key factors behind them. Specifically, we show
1) the random topology formulation can lead to convergence and stability;
2) the video streaming performance is critically affected by system
dynamics, in particular churns;  3) the system exhibits excellent scaling
property yet the uploading capacity contributions from peers are highly
skewed, in which a small percentage of peers conbtribute most; 4) the
scale and streaming performance is largely determined how well the system
can handle the flash crowd in live streaming event.


Date:			Friday, 25 July 2008

Time:			2:30p.m.-4:30p.m.

Venue:			Room 3494
			Lifts 25-26

Chairman:		Prof. Tongyi Zhang (MECH)

Committee Members:	Prof. Bo Li (Supervisor)
			Prof. Lionel Ni
			Prof. Qian Zhang
			Prof. Michael Wong (PHYS)
			Prof Baochun Li (Elec. & Comp. Engg.,
					 Univ. of Toronto)


**** ALL are Welcome ****