Performance Comparison of Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution Schemes

In this paper we compare and evaluate two multicast approaches for delay sensitive media distribution in P2P networks. First approach is based on cooperative m-ary trees, while the second approach is based on a cooperative mesh network. Both schemes exploit the full upload capacity of the participating peers and their proximity relation. Our delivery strategy involves the full cooperation between all participating peers, including the source. In both schemes, the source splits the content into several blocks and distributes them to all requesting peers via multiple trees or a meshed network. Every peer contributes its upload capacity by being a forwarding peer into the distribution infrastructure. We evaluate both multicast approaches in terms of end-to-end delay. Our performance evaluation made in Planet Lab shows that both multicast approaches achieve different content delivery delay when the participating peers are allocated far together in a wide area networks.