On Network Utilization of Peer-to-Peer Video Live Streaming on the Internet

Efficient network utilization is essential towards the deployment of large scale peer-to-peer (P2P) video live streaming services on the Internet. Push-pull hybrid schemes and pull schemes provide practical solutions to P2P video live streaming, but network utilization remains unaddressed. To the best of our knowledge, a study of network utilization in the context of P2P video live streaming does not exist in the literature. In this paper, we use "typical" hybrid and pull schemes to investigate network utilization and whether the neighbour-with-nearby-peers strategy is applicable to P2P video live streaming applications, and provide a model to analyze peers\´ behavior. We find hybrid and pull schemes have limited capability in choosing low cost overlay edges although hybrid schemes are slightly better. The chunk tree height in hybrid schemes is significantly larger than in pull schemes. The neighbour-with-nearby-peers strategy reduces the chunk tree cost; however, it also results in a significantly larger tree height, lower reliability, and is less robust against peer churn, especially in hybrid schemes.