CoolStreaming/DONet: a data-driven overlay network for peer-to-peer live media streaming

This paper presents DONet, a data-driven overlay network for live media streaming. The core operations in DONet are very simple: every node periodically exchanges data availability information with a set of partners, and retrieves unavailable data from one or more partners, or supplies available data to partners. We emphasize three salient features of this data-driven design: 1) easy to implement, as it does not have to construct and maintain a complex global structure; 2) efficient, as data forwarding is dynamically determined according to data availability while not restricted by specific directions; and 3) robust and resilient, as the partnerships enable adaptive and quick switching among multi-suppliers. We show through analysis that DONet is scalable with bounded delay. We also address a set of practical challenges for realizing DONet, and propose an efficient member and partnership management algorithm, together with an intelligent scheduling algorithm that achieves real-time and continuous distribution of streaming contents. We have extensively evaluated the performance of DONet over the PlanetLab. Our experiments, involving almost all the active PlanetLab nodes, demonstrate that DONet achieves quite good streaming quality even under formidable network conditions. Moreover, its control overhead and transmission delay are both kept at low levels. An Internet-based DONet implementation, called CoolStreaming v.0.9, was released on May 30, 2004, which has attracted over 30000 distinct users with more than 4000 simultaneously being online at some peak times. We discuss the key issues toward designing CoolStreaming in this paper, and present several interesting observations from these large-scale tests; in particular, the larger the overlay size, the better the streaming quality it can deliver.