Scalable Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming in WiMAX Networks

The increasing popularity and success of web-based peer-to-peer (P2P) systems for streaming video applications make them likely candidates for injecting large volumes of traffic in the emerging WiMAX networks. This paper develops a lightweight mechanism for P2P streaming in WiMAX networks that significantly reduces the load on the network and improves the scalability of the streaming system. The proposed system uses the broadcast mechanism provided in the IEEE 802.16 mechanism for providing the scalability, without breaking the P2P semantics. The scalability of the proposed system is analytically evaluated and also quantified using simulations. Our results show that the degree of improvement in the performance of the proposed system is lower bounded by the average number of peers served by an Access Service Network Gateway in the WiMAX networks.