Efficient Hybrid Push-Pull Based P2P Media Streaming System

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication is a popular protocol that has significant impacted and also changed the way for files being distributed over the large networks. Variants of P2P protocols are also applied for other media distribution such as audio and video streaming. The P2P protocol is widely adapted by researchers as a method to handle larger group of users. Cool streaming, the first large scale P2P streaming experiment till today, applied a mesh-based streaming system which has slowly evolved from a pure pull system to a hybrid push-pull system. In this paper, we present our proposed push-pull scheduling for P2P streaming that can heuristically select the most optimal frame to be pushed based on the rules that we designed. Our proposed solution incorporates the fast content distribution characteristic of both Push and Pull approaches. For performance evaluation, we compare our scheduling algorithm with the pure pull Cool streaming scheduling and Random push-pull scheduling where both scheduling serve as a benchmark in three main criteria - end-to-end delay, frame miss-ratio and frame redundancy. Simulation results showed that our proposed heuristic push-pull overall outperformed the other scheduling schemes, where our proposed scheduling algorithm demonstrates as a better solution towards reducing mesh delay in P2P streaming.