PPM - A Hybrid Push-Pull Mesh-Based Peer-to-Peer Live Video Streaming Protocol

Using Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks have become a progressively popular approach for streaming live media over the Internet due to their deployment simplicity and scalability. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid push-pull live P2P video streaming protocol called PPM that combines the benefits of pull and push mechanisms for video delivery. Our main goal is to minimize the network end-to-end delay compared to the pure mesh networks. The PPM consists of two phases; Pull-based and Push-based. In the first phase, a new peer joins to the network based on a pull-based mechanism. In the second phase, a parent node based on the peers´ overlay hop count in the mesh topology is selected. Then, a dynamic tree is constructed to push the high priority video frames to the children of the selected parent. Using OMNET++ as the simulation platform, we show that beside significant improvement on the end-to-end delay, PPM achieves lower visual distortion compared to the pure mesh networks. Moreover, the simulation results confirm superiority of the PPM in comparison with the popular mesh-based P2P streaming systems.