Pattern-Push: A low-delay mesh-push scheduling for live peer-to-peer streaming

In live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming, each peer (child) has a number of supplying parents whose packets have to be scheduled and delivered in time for continuous playback at the child. It is challenging to develop a scheduling algorithm that achieves low delay given heterogeneous bandwidth, propagation delays and available content in all the parents. This paper proposes a novel, simple and effective scheduling scheme called pattern-push. As compared to the traditional mesh-pull, pattern-push does not require continuous buffermap advertisements from the parents, and operates on the packet level instead of the larger segment level. In pattern-push, each parent pushes its packets according to a pattern as indicated by a starting packet ID and a cycle bitmap. Pattern-push requires only minimal feedback from the child, as the pattern only needs to be changed when the child detects a marked change in network conditions or its parents. Simulation results show that pattern-push achieves a significantly lower delay and overhead as compared with both traditional and recent scheduling algorithms proposed in the literature.