Design of Algorithms and Protocols for Peer-To-Peer Streaming Systems

Peer-to-Peer Streaming (P2P-TV) systems have been studied in the literature for some time and they are becoming popular among users as well. P2P-TV systems target the real time delivery of a video stream, therefore posing different challenges compared to more traditional peer-to-peer applications such as file sharing (BitTor-rent) or VoIP (Skype). This document focuses on mesh based P2P-TV systems in which the peers form a generic overlay topology at application level upon which peers exchange small “chunks ” of video. In particular, we study two problems related with this kind of systems: i) how to induce peers to share their available resources – such as their available upload bandwidth – in a totally automatic and distributed way; ii) how to localize P2P-TV traffic in order to lower the load on the underlying transport network without impairing the quality of experience (QoE) perceived by users. Goal i) can be achieved playing on two key aspects of P2P-TV systems that are