An Experimental Distributed Protocol to Serve Dynamic Groups for Peer-to-Peer Streaming

Peer-To-Peer (P2P) streaming has been widely deployed over the Internet. A streaming system usually has multiple channels, and peers may form multiple groups for content distribution. In this paper, the authors propose a distributed overlay framework (called SMesh) for dynamic groups where users may frequently hop from one group to another while the total pool of users remain stable. SMesh first builds a relatively stable mesh consisting of all hosts for control messaging. The mesh supports dynamic host joining and leaving, and will guide the construction of delivery trees.