On scheduling of peer-to-peer video services

Peer-to-peer (P2P) video systems provide a cost-effective way for a large number of hosts to collaborate for video sharing. Two features characterize such a system: 1) a video is usually available on many participating hosts, and 2) different hosts typically have different sets of videos, though some may partially overlap. From a client´s perspective, it can be served by any host having the video it requests. From a server´s perspective, it be used to serve any client requesting the videos it has. Thus, an important question is, which servers should be used to serve which clients in the system? In this paper, we refer to this problem as service scheduling and show that different matches between clients and servers can result in significantly different system performance. Finding a right server for each client is challenging not only because a client can choose only the servers that are within its limited search scope, but also because clients arrive at different times, which are not known a priori. In this paper, we address these challenges with a novel technique called Shaking. While the proposed technique makes it possible for a client to be served by a server that is beyond the client´s own search scope, it is able to dynamically adjust the match between the servers and their pending requests as new requests arrive. Our performance study shows that our new technique can dynamically balance the system workload and significantly improve the overall system performance