A Review of Resilient Approaches to Peer-to-Peer Overlay Multicast for Media Streaming

The success of peer-to-peer overlay multicast for media streaming depends on their scalability. However, as multicast functionality is pushed to autonomous, unpredictable end systems, significant performance loss can be resulted from their higher degree of churn when compared to routers. Data distribution path over an overlay consisting of unreliable peers is inherently subject to disturbances. Resilience is thus inevitably a key requirement to peer-to-peer streaming architectures. Currently, a number of techniques have been proposed to improve overlays resilience by exploiting path diversity to minimize nodes dependencies and data redundancy. In this article, we present a survey of the media distribution resilient approaches proposed in literature. We classify them based on overlay topology design and error-resilient control approaches, illustrating with some representative protocols. And to achieve better performance in P2P video streaming systems, multiple-tree or mesh-based overlay topologies combining with error-resilient transport is essential.