Modeling Push-Based Live P2P Streaming by Stochastic Activity Networks

Live P2P streaming has been widely used in recent years because of its scalability and low costs. At the same time, it meets some new challenges that centralized systems never faced, for example, churn and content pollution. It is the first paper which uses stochastic activity networks (SANs) to model and analyze pushbased live P2P streaming systems from the users’ point of view. The model provides a new line of thinking to model push-based live P2P streaming, which enables the effect of churn, pollution and buffer size to be studied simultaneously. It explains why there is a gap between theoretical results in previous studies of content pollution in P2P streaming and the observed effect. It also points out the threshold of buffer size for non-significant QoS improvement.