Coping with Unreliable Peers for Hybrid Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming

In this paper, we propose a hybrid peer-to-peer streaming architecture for large scale media streaming service. The proposed architecture combines peer-to-peer system and centralized server to exploit advantages of the two models. Then, we deal with streaming load allocation problem under the proposed scheme. Given a set of centralized servers and a set of unreliable supplying peers with heterogeneous bandwidth offers, we show how to assign streaming load to a subset of supplying peers, while considering unreliable performance of each peers. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme, compared with legacy server with similar capacity, increases the number of clients about 67% on the average.