An Alliance based Peering Scheme for Peer-to-Peer Live Media Streaming

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming has emerged as a scalable method for media distribution in recent years. While re-cent measurement studies have shown the effectiveness of P2P network in media streaming, there have been ques-tions raised about the Quality of Service (QoS), reliability of streaming services and sub optimal uplink utilization in particular. We present a new model for P2P media stream-ing where nodes cluster into groups, called alliances, for a symbiotic association in order to share the media content. We show that alliance formation is an effective way to orga-nize the peers in loosely coupled groups. The node topology formed using alliances generates a Small World Network, which exhibit efficient overlay structures in terms of path lengths between the nodes and robustness to network per-turbations like churn. We present a comparative perfor-mance evaluation of our model with CoolStreaming/DONet on QoS metrics