Design of a P2P Live Multimedia Streaming System with Hybrid Push and Pull Mechanisms

With the rapid development of network technology, many multimedia streaming services are developing rapidly. The traditional multimedia providers use client-server architecture, where the server bottleneck and the cost of transmission bandwidth are the most obvious drawbacks. Therefore, P2P technology has been used in multimedia streaming services to enhance the scalability and performance of the system. Basically, P2P multimedia streaming technology can be classified into two categories, tree-based and mesh-based. The tree-based multimedia streaming system is vulnerable to peer churn, where means very high-fluctuated peer arrival rate and leave rate. In this paper, we propose a mesh-based multimedia streaming system to reduce the influence of peer churn and implement hybrid push and pull mechanisms to reduce the control messages and the round-trip delay between requests and responses. Moreover, with effective buffer scheduling and some algorithms to reduce the effect of system dynamics, our system provides a reliable, scalable, and robust live streaming service. Users can enjoy high quality of video streaming through our system anytime, anywhere. With UDP hole punching technology, users behind NAT can also experience video streaming smoothly.