Request-driven swarming scheme for P2P data streaming

Data streaming by swarming over peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks has attracted much attention in recent years and initially the swarming solution is based on data-driven schemes. This paper presents a new request-driven swarming scheme. The scheme offers several advantages: high efficiency in data delivery, low control overhead, and flexibility in streaming control. Some key issues on the design of the relevant scheduling and forwarding mechanisms are discussed. In addition, we present a scheduling model for this scheme and propose some heuristics. Our evaluation of these heuristics reveals that there is a tradeoff among performance metrics such as delivery reliability, loading on the underlay network, and on the streaming overlay network. Comparing our proposed request-driven scheme with an existing data-driven scheme using computer simulation, we find that our request-driven scheme incurs much lower control overhead while providing comparable or better efficiency in data delivery.