Whirlpool: Structuring Mesh-Based Protocol for QoS-Aware Peer-to-Peer Streaming

Membership service is an essential problem in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks since many p2p applications such as media broadcasting and content distribution require a high performance overlay structure to deliver satisfying quality of service (QoS). The speed a peer locating a good neighbor can greatly affect the QoS of the application running on that peer. In this paper, we present a new mesh-based P2P multicast protocol called Whirlpool. The core idea in Whirlpool is the General Tree-Based Streaming Model, which organizes the peers into different levels based on their end-to-end latencies from the streaming source. The level calculation algorithm is totally distributed and can also provide the peers with biased direction in terms of end-to-end latency in selections of neighbor peers. The experiment results show that: (1) Whirlpool is scalable and robust to highly dynamic environment; (2) With the help of Whirlpool, peers can quickly locate good neighbors based on their QoS characteristics.