Hierarchically Clustered P2P Streaming System

Peer-to-peer video streaming has been gaining popularity. However, it is still challenging to manage a P2P system efficiently to support high video playback rate. In this paper, we propose HCPS - Hierarchically Clustered P2P Streaming system that can support a streaming rate approaching the optimum upper bound with short delay, yet is simple enough to be implemented in practice. In HCPS, the peers are grouped into clusters and a hierarchy is formed among clusters to retrieve video data from the source server. By actively balancing the uploading capacities among clusters, and executing the perfect scheduling algorithm [1] within each cluster, the system resource can be fully utilized. The simulation experiments driven by the traces collected from a real P2P streaming system demonstrate the effectiveness of HCPS.