Scheduling P2P multimedia streams: Can we achieve performance and robustness?

Scheduling the transmission of information in P2P applications is one of the main challenges, and one of the keys to success, for these applications. We concentrate on low-latency streaming applications (e.g. TV) and explore different combinations of chunk and peer scheduling strategies, finding that the majority of the proposals found in the literature are not robust to changing conditions. We then propose a new scheduling combination that aims at robustness in face of heterogeneous distribution of peers´ available bandwidth and we show, through a comprehensive set of simulated realistic scenarios, that this scheduler outperforms all other combinations in any scenario experimented.