A Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm for efficient P2P video streaming system

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file downloading and streaming applications have recently attracted a large number of users on the Internet. Currently, several P2P video streaming systems have been deployed to reduce server cost. They can be classified into two categories live and on-demand streaming systems. The live streaming systems disseminate live video contents to all the peers in real time. On the other hand, the on-demand video (VoD) streaming system enables peers to enjoy the flexibility of watching a video. An implicit, self-organized and unstructured Multicast Overlay Network (MON) of peers has been proposed [1]. It is organized into MON-Clusters. Each MON-Cluster is composed of independent edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. The existence of cycles leads to duplication of packets. MON was designed to multicast/flood small-data size (e.g. warning messages) to all peers. Duplication caused due to flooding of small data-packets does not have significant impacts on network traffic. However, duplication of video-packets will have significant impacts on network traffic. Thus the proposed MON is not appropriate to multicast video packets. This paper proposes a novel (Minimum Spanning Tree)-Cluster (MST-Cluster) algorithm over each cluster to avoid duplicated packets. As a result, the MST-Cluster algorithm reduces the network traffic for efficient video streaming.