Low latency overlay construction for peer-to-peer live streaming

Peer-to-peer live streaming is becoming popular and a large number of multimedia content is streamed to millions of users through it. Some major problems associated with the applications are long playback latency and fragile to network churn. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to construct a pyramid overlay. Compared with the conventional mesh-based and tree-based overlay, the pyramid overlay can achieve better result both in real-time playback and robust topology. Through limiting peerspsila connection bandwidth with upper layers and make it a priority to disseminate data to more different peers, more peers can share the upload bandwidth from the upper layers and the peer number is increased with level increment. Thus, our approach organizes the peers into a pyramid topology and reduces the total number of layer. At the same time, the participating peers build connections with multiple parent peers and child peers simultaneously and change data transmission path dynamically. Then, it is resilient to network churn. Experiments carried out over a simulated network of up to 500 peers illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.