A Simulation Study of Unstructured P2P Overlay for Multimedia Streaming

P2P overlay potentially provides an efficient routing architecture that is self-organizing, massively scalable, and robust in a wide area. To improve the requesting nodes´ QoS routing and to reduce the bandwidth and processing consumption of the nodes in a P2P system, three correlative requirements should be considered and satisfied: (1) to make system structure to be scalable; (2) to locate and route information at a low cost and efficiently without global view of the system; (3) to make the overlay robust in front of the dynamic topologies. However, not all P2P systems are compatible with multimedia streaming. Unstructured systems are designed more specifically than structured systems for the heterogeneous Internet environment, where the nodes´ persistence and availability are not guaranteed. In this paper, three correlative standards for evaluating the compatibility of a P2P system with multimedia streaming are presented. A detailed measurement study of three popular unstructured P2P overlays and our overlay called MPO is performed. Our method is to analyze performances of classical searching algorithms in various overlays. Key factors in content locations including scalability, query success rate, query messages, cost, disturbed times and fault tolerance are considered carefully. The simulation results show some characteristics in unstructured P2P overlay and prove that MPO is a highly efficient, low cost and fault tolerant overlay and a good structure for applications in multimedia streaming.