[e2e] papers on p2p streaming and broadband network performance available

[Venkat Padmanabhan]

Two recent papers on resilient P2P streaming and broadband network
(cable, DSL) performance are available from the CoopNet project page:
http://www.research.microsoft.com/projects/CoopNet/ The abstracts of the
papers are listed below. Comments appreciated.

-Venkat



1. Resilient Peer-to-Peer Streaming
V. N. Padmanabhan, H. J. Wang, and P. A. Chou
Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2003-11
March 2003
http://www.research.microsoft.com/projects/CoopNet/papers/msr-tr-2003-11
.pdf
http://www.research.microsoft.com/projects/CoopNet/papers/msr-tr-2003-11
.ps


Abstract:

We consider the problem of distributing "live" streaming media content
to a potentially large and highly dynamic population of hosts.
Peer-to-peer content distribution is attractive in this setting because
the bandwidth available to serve content scales with demand. A key
challenge, however, is making content distribution robust to peer
transience. Our approach to providing robustness is to introduce
redundancy, both in network paths and in data. We use multiple, diverse
distribution trees to provide redundancy in network paths and multiple
description coding (MDC) to provide redundancy in data. 

We present a simple tree management algorithm that provides the
necessary path diversity and describe an adaptation framework for MDC
based on scalable receiver feedback. We evaluate these using MDC applied
to real video data coupled with real usage traces from a major news site
that experienced a large flash crowd for live streaming content. Our
results show significant benefits in using multiple distribution trees
and MDC. We also present a method for combining MDC with traditional
layering to accommodate bandwidth heterogeneity. Our layered MDC
construction enables a novel hybrid parent- and child-driven congestion
control scheme appropriate for situations where the last-hop links of
end-hosts are prone to congestion.



2. Network Performance of Broadband Hosts: Measurements & Implications
K. Lakshminarayanan and V. N. Padmanabhan
Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2003-15
March 2003
http://www.research.microsoft.com/projects/CoopNet/papers/msr-tr-2003-15
.pdf
http://www.research.microsoft.com/projects/CoopNet/papers/msr-tr-2003-15
.ps


Abstract:

With the rapid growth in the popularity of and the research interest in
peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, an interesting question is what the quality
of network connectivity between peers in the ``real world'' is and what
implications this has for applications. In this paper, we describe an
effort called {\em PeerMetric} to directly measure P2P network
performance from the vantage point of broadband-connected residential
hosts. Our measurements indicate significant asymmetry in bandwidth,
with median downstream and upstream available bandwidths of 900 Kbps and
212 Kbps, respectively. We argue that the availability of last-hop
bandwidth is more important than the traditional consideration of
locality for overlay multicast over broadband hosts. We also considered
the peer selection problem and found that a simple delay-vector based
approach is effective for finding proximate peers (in terms of latency).
However, P2P latency turns out to be a poor predictor of P2P TCP
throughput, which may be the metric of interest for applications such as
file sharing.