iGridMedia: Providing Delay-Guaranteed Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming Service on Internet
Almost all existing peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems can only provide non-interactive service on Internet. In this paper, we focus on providing delay-guaranteed service to support delay-tolerant interactive applications (such as online auction, person interview, video sharing & commenting, etc.) using P2P streaming technology. In an interactive channel, all or part of the participants can interact with the presenter or publisher at the source. Unlike existing P2P streaming service, there is different level of delay and synchronization requirement in the interactive applications, meanwhile, the participant number in each channel is relatively small but the concurrent channel number is large. With such challenges, how much server bandwidth can be saved in P2P streaming is an interesting problem. We propose a very practical protocol iGridMedia and fully implement it. The basic tradeoff between consumed server bandwidth and the required delay is carefully studied. Simulation and real-world experiment show that our system consumes only about 4 times streaming rate with 5 sec guaranteed delay even if the peer churn rate is high. So far as we know, our work represents the state-of- the-art approach that using P2P technology to support emergent interactive live applications on Internet with delay-guaranteed requirement.