Longer, Better: On Extending User Online Duration to Improve Quality of Streaming Service in P2P Networks

During recent years, the Internet has witnessed a rapid growth in deployment of peer to peer (P2P) based live media streaming systems. In this paper, we are motivated to investigate the problem of improving the streaming quality of service (QoS) of those systems by two universal recognitions: one is that the understanding to practical service experiences would benefit the performance enhancement, while the other is "the more, the better" design philosophy in P2P networks. As an interesting approach, we first retrieve the practical online duration information of end users from service traces in our GridMedia system, and then intentionally extend the online duration of each peer, which would result in a more stable peer overlay. The comparative simulations with original real-world traces and modified ones demonstrate that the quality of streaming service would be better if peers stay longer in the community. We claim that, this simple but positive result essentially validates both the influence of end users\´ behaviors and the need of an incentive to encourage users to spend more time in P2P live streaming systems.