PALMS : Reliable P2P Live Media Streaming

In recent year, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach for media streaming has been studied extensively. In comparison to on-demand media streaming, P2P live media streaming faces a much stringent time constraint. In order to improve the performance metrics, such as startup delay, source-to-end delay, and playback continuity, we present PALMS, a P2P approach for live media streaming where node employs gossip based pull and push protocols to receive and forward media data among connected nodes. We present a simple heuristic mechanism for the pull protocol in the selection of media segments and peers. Besides the pull method, a push method is deployed to increase the streaming quality. We also adopt a randomized push protocol in order to increase the probability of media data delivered to connected nodes. We know that the presence of freeriders could degrade the delivered streaming quality. In PALMS, a simple tit-for-tat incentive mechanism is adopted to discourage the existence of free-riders. We conducted simulations and performance comparisons for PALMS. Experimental results demonstrate that PALMS can deliver better streaming quality and more resilience towards the heterogeneity of network bandwidths as compared to some of the existing protocols.