Overlay management for P2PTV streaming

Recently, P2P streaming has received much attention as a new technology for delivering multimedia content over the internet to the end-users on the periphery. This technology is inherent to the overlay network which is constructed by the logical connections among the end-users, which are known as peers. Therefore, the management of peers (overlay) on top of the internet is an important aspect from the network point of view, which concerns distributing the load among the participant peers, maintaining the logical connections between the senders and the receivers to pursue low communication latency, enhancing the throughput, and monitoring link failure and churn of peers. In this paper, we are proposing a mechanism for the self-management of the overlay network connections among the source peers. Our proposed mechanism is based on clustering the peers; active measurements of a logical distance metric round trip time (RTT) - between a receiving node and the other sender peers; and periodical handover techniques. Our proposed scheme has been implemented, tested, and verified using the ns-2 simulator. Our results show a significant improvement in load balancing and QoS.