Quality-aware segment transmission scheduling in peer-to-peer streaming systems

In peer-to-peer (P2P) mesh-based streaming systems, each video sequence is typically divided into segments, which are then streamed from multiple senders to a receiver. The receiver needs to coordinate the senders by specifying a transmission schedule for each of them. We consider the scheduling problem in both live and on-demand P2P streaming systems. We formulate the problem of scheduling segment transmission in order to maximize the perceived video quality of the receiver. We prove that this problem is NP-Complete. We present an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation for this problem, and we optimally solve it using an ILP solver. This optimal solution, however, is computationally expensive and is not suitable for real-time streaming systems. Thus, we propose a polynomial-time approximation algorithm, which yields transmission schedules with analytical guarantees on the worst-case performance. More precisely, we show that the approximation factor is at most 3, compared to the absolutely optimal solution as a benchmark. We implement the proposed approximation and optimal algorithms in a packet-level simulator for P2P streaming systems. We also implement two other scheduling algorithms proposed in the literature and used in popular P2P streaming systems. By simulating large P2P systems and streaming nine real video sequences with diverse visual and motion characteristics, we demonstrate that our proposed approximation algorithm: (i) produces near-optimal perceived video quality, (ii) can run in real time, and (iii) outperforms other algorithms in terms of perceived video quality, smoothness of the rendered videos, and balancing the load across sending peers. For example, our simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms heuristic algorithms used in current systems by up to 8 dB in perceived video quality and up to 20% in continuity index.