NAT-Aware Peer Grouping and Chunk Scheduling for Mesh-Pull P2P Live Streaming Systems

Live streaming (a.k.a. Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)) services have been popularly deployed on the Internet. Traditionally, IPTV service provider adopted client-server architecture. However, when the client population grows up to a certain amount, it usually faces the scalability and cost-effective problems. Fortunately, the development of Peer to Peer (P2P) content sharing application has proved that the P2P paradigm is an efficient solution to deliver many kinds of content over the Internet. P2P IPTV services may face the problem that there are more and more Network Address Translator (NAT) users, and peers behind NAT (NATed peer) cannot directly deliver its streaming data to other NATed peers. This situation easily leads to the so-called free rider problem. In this paper, we propose a grouping and scheduling scheme to increase the share rate of NATed peers. By restricting transmission connectivity of those peers with public IP address and properly arrange data chunks delivery, we could allow NATed peer to contribute more data on the overlay network. Simulation results show that proposed scheme can improve the performance in terms of the share rate and video playback quality compared to original NAT traversal mechanism. Besides, the deployment complexity of both P2P IPTV operators and peers, are expected reduction.