Heterogeneity and Incentives for Peer-to-Peer Video Broadcasting:

We propose the design of bandwidth-demanding broadcasting applications using overlays in environments characterized by hosts with limited and asymmetric bandwidth, and significant heterogeneity in outgoing bandwidth. Such environments are critical to consider to extend the applicability of overlay multicast to mainstream Internet environments where insufficient bandwidth exists to support all hosts, but have not received adequate attention from the research community. We leverage the multi-tree framework and design heuristics to enable it to consider host contribution and operate in bandwidth-scarce environments. Our extensions seek to simultaneously achieve good utilization of system resources, performance to hosts commensurate to their contributions, and consistent performance. We have implemented the system and conducted an Internet evaluation on PlanetLab using real traces from previous operational deployments of an overlay broadcasting system.

Publications

• The Impact of Heterogeneous Bandwidth Constraints on DHT-Based Multicast Protocols, Ashwin Bharambe, Sanjay G. Rao, Venkat Padmanabhan, Srinivasan Seshan and Hui Zhang, The Fourth International Workshop on P2P Systems (IPTPS) 2005, Ithaca, February 2005. [PDF]