Generalized connections and incentives for supporting CE devices in live streaming systems

In the modern web applications, users have assumed a prominent role by effectively contributing to the provision of some online services, such as live streaming of multimedia content. For instance, while users watch a football match or a concert through those applications, their devices may also be sharing the received content with others who are interested in the same event, defining a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) service model. The state of the art solutions for this purpose are highly dependent on the end-points and the available network bandwidth, hindering the use of some devices (e.g. phone, tablets, TVs, etc.). In this context, the Global Media Transmission Protocol (GMTP) is proposed, a cross-layer network/transport protocol that uses access routers as the end-point of a system-independent P2P network and to cache contents of servers in Content Delivery Networks (CDN). It is discussed how GMTP enables users of a variety of smart consumer electronic devices to use GMTP-based systems, as well as a technique for encouraging users to share their network resources according to the principle that the more a user´s router shares bandwidth, the more incentives a user´s router will receive from the network. The evaluation results show that GMTP can reduce the startup delay in mobile devices, while scaling the number of nodes without increasing the bandwidth consumption, independent of the device type.