On Meeting P2P Streaming Bandwidth Demand With Limited Supplies

As a basic requirement of live peer-to-peer multimedia streaming sessions, the streaming playback rate needs to be strictly enforced at each of the peers. In real-world peer-to-peer streaming sessions with very large scales, the number of streaming servers for each session may not be easily increased, leading to a limited supply of bandwidth. To scale to a large number of peers, one prefers to regulate the bandwidth usage on each of the overlay links in an optimal fashion, such that limited supplies of bandwidth may be maximally utilized. In this paper, the authors propose a decentralized bandwidth allocation algorithm that can be practically implemented in peer-to-peer streaming sessions.