Performance Bounds for Peer-Assisted Live Streaming

Peer-assisted live streaming is a promising way for service providers to offer high-quality IPTV to consumers at reasonable cost. In peerassisted streaming, the peers (e.g., running on set-top boxes) exchange video chunks with one another, and receive additional data from the central server as needed. In this paper, we analyze how to provision resources for the streaming system, in terms of the server capacity, the video quality, and the depth of the distribution trees that deliver the content. We derive the optimal values for minimum server load, maximum stream rate, and minimum hop count under different constraints on how the peers contribute to the system, including their upload capacity and the number of neighbors they can support. In addition to showing that our performance bounds are tight, we present algorithms for constructing trees that achieve our bounds.