title: Streaming Live Media over Peers
creator: Deshpande, Hrishikesh
creator: Bawa, Mayank
creator: Garcia-Molina, Hector
subject: Distributed Systems
subject: Miscellaneous
description: The high bandwidth required by live streaming video greatly limits the number of clients that can be served by a source using unicast. An efficient solution is IP-multicast, but it suffers from poor deployment. Application-level multicast is being increasingly recognized as a viable alternative.  In this work, we discuss and evaluate a tree-based overlay network called {\em PeerCast} that uses clients to forward the stream to their peers. PeerCast is designed as a live-media streaming solution for peer-to-peer systems that are populated by hundreds of autonomous, short-lived nodes. Further, we argue for the need to take end-host behavior into account while evaluating an application-level multicast architecture. An end-host behavior model is proposed that allows us to capture a range of realistic peer behavior. Using this model, we develop robust, yet simple, tree-maintenance policies. Through empirical runs and extensive simulations, we show that PeerCast provides good QoS, which gracefully degrades with the number of clients.  We have implemented a PeerCast prototype, which is available for download. 
publisher: Stanford InfoLab
date: 2002
type: Techreport
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/863/1/2002-21.pdf
identifier: Deshpande, Hrishikesh and Bawa, Mayank and Garcia-Molina, Hector (2002) Streaming Live Media over Peers. Technical Report. Stanford InfoLab.
relation: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/863/