Heterogeneity in data-driven live streaming: Blessing or curse?

Distributed live streaming has brought a lot of interest in the past few years. In the homogeneous case (all nodes having the same capacity), many algorithms have been proposed, which have been proven almost optimal or optimal. On the other hand, the performance of heterogeneous systems is not completely understood yet. In this paper, we investigate the impact of heterogeneity on the achievable delay of chunk-based live streaming systems. We propose several models for taking the atomicity of a chunk into account. For all these models, when considering the transmission of a single chunk, heterogeneity is indeed a ¿blessing¿, in the sense that the achievable delay is always shorter than an equivalent homogeneous system. But for a stream of chunks, we show that it can be a ¿curse¿: there are systems where the achievable delay can be arbitrary greater compared to equivalent homogeneous systems. However, if the system is slightly bandwidth-over-provisioned, optimal single chunk diffusion schemes can be adapted to a stream of chunks, leading to near-optimal, faster than homogeneous systems, heterogeneous live streaming systems.