Load balancing model for mobile peer-to-peer networks-based 3D streaming

Recently a great deal of attention has been dedicated to the design of virtual environment based class of applications. So far, a significant body of work has been devoted to the challenges of 3D streaming with a desktop scenario; whereas a little research work has been committed to 3D streaming on thin mobile devices that mainly focused to address challenges such as streaming performance, bandwidth limitation, and supplying partners strategies. To deal with the latter issue, i.e. supplying partner strategies, several approaches proposed to use a nearby peer. However, since mobile devices have limited capabilities and resources, there is a high probability that a number of peers will be always serving the peers in need, which makes them overloaded and which consumes their resources. Therefore, a load balancing mechanism has to be added in order to balance the overhead among peers and avoid having an overloaded peer, with low energy, and reduced resources and bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a load balancing mechanism for P2P mobile 3D streaming supplying partners techniques. Our proposed scheme tries, using a set of parameters and cost factors, (1) to identify the highly active peers, i.e. those that are frequently selected to stream data to peers in need, (2) to unburden the loaded sources, and (3) to make a balanced distribution of content among the remaining supplying partners. By applying the load balancing mechanism in conjunction with the supplying partner strategies, our protocol ensures to make the system costs shared among peers. Moreover, it unburdens the loaded peers in order to improve their streaming performance. After an extensive set of simulations and performance evaluations, we show that our proposed load balancing technique notably unloads the busy nodes, which ameliorates the 3D streaming in mobile environments in terms of fast processing and good resources utilization.