Variable Neighbor Selection in Live Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming Networks

Abstract-Oata-driven (or swarming based) streaming is one of the popular ways to distribute live multimedia streaming traffc over Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The efficiency and user sat-isfaction highly depend on the constructed overlays. The com-mon neighbor selection algorithms in existing overlay construc-tion schemes usually randomly select a fixed number of neigh-bors which satisfy the selection requirements, such as end-to-end delay or a peer's sojourn time. However, this fixed random neighbor-selection algorithm (FRNS) neglects the peers ' upload bandwidth heterogeneity and therefore, the upload bandwidth cannot be efficiently used. In this paper, we propose a variable random neighbor-selection (VRNS) scheme to alleviate the prob-lems due to bandwidth heterogeneity, and in which the number of neighbors with different upload bandwidths is dynaD"lically de-termined by the statistical bandwidth information of the system