P2P streaming capacity: Survey and recent results

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems provide a scalable way to stream content to multiple receivers over the Internet and has become a major type of application traffic. The maximum rate achievable by all receivers is the capacity of a P2P streaming session. We provide a taxonomy of the problem formulations. In each formulation, computing P2P streaming capacity requires the computation of an optimal set of multicast trees, generally with an exponential complexity. We survey the family of constructive, polynomial-time algorithms that can compute P2P streaming capacity and the associated multicast trees, arbitrarily accurately for some of the formulations, and to some approximation factors in other formulations. Performance evaluation using large-scale Internet trace is provided before open problems in this research area are discussed.