Revisiting peering strategies in push-pull based P2P streaming systems

Recently, some push-pull scheduling strategies have been proposed to replace the classical pull mechanism in mesh based P2P streaming systems. A push-pull mechanism is more efficient in terms of the overheads and leads to much better playback delay performance since the pull part is mainly used either at the beginning of the session or to recover lost content. Since a push-pull mechanism typically leads to low scheduling delays, the content delivery delay is impacted mostly by the overlay path length. New peering strategies are then needed to exploit such an advantage. In this paper, we propose two new peering strategies that we compare to a recent proposal of Ren et al. (2008). With resiliency in mind, the strategy variations being compared in this paper impose a fixed number of parents to each node. The two strategies that we propose lead to the lowest playback delays: They lead to overlays with short paths to the source.