Enhancing multimedia streaming performance through peer-paired collaboration

In this paper, a novel multimedia streaming framework called peer-paired pyramid streaming (P³S) is proposed. The philosophy of P³S is to enable collaboration between clients so as to bring in better performance. The structure of P³S is basically a hybrid client/server and peer-to-peer structure and exhibits a triangle-cell based hierarchy. Based on P³S, performance enhancement techniques are designed to increase the aggregated bandwidth of all participants. We present an optimal data allocation algorithm, which maximizes the overall throughput of the whole streaming session. We also present a greedy data allocation algorithm that is slightly suboptimal but much simpler. Extensive simulations were performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed techniques.