Improving P2P streaming in community-lab through local strategies

Distributing live streaming in Wireless Community Networks (WCNs) is a service with a high added value; however, cloud-based streaming, as commonly used in the Internet, does not fit well the architecture of WCNs, which often have restricted access to the Internet. Modern WCNs, instead, can have a good internal connectivity with high bandwidth. A P2P approach is thus well matched for streaming in WCNs. This paper presents experimental results obtained with PeerStreamer running on top of Community-Lab, a test-bed realized by the CONFINE EU Project for the experimentation of novel protocols in community networks. The experiments highlight relevant differences between a WCN and the Internet, and we propose strategies that can be implemented on all the peers or even only locally on the source to improve the streaming quality. These strategies are based on simple heuristics and can be activated dynamically when the streaming quality degrades below a given threshold.