PeerGraph: A Distributed Data Structure for Peer-to-Peer Streaming

Video streaming over peer-to-peer networks has received significant attention recently. Accordingly, much work is done on video streaming under the assumption that all the peers have the whole movie. However, it is likely that many peers may only store a fraction of the movie due to their resource constraints. Therefore, there is a need to develop appropriate mechanisms to facilitate efficient streaming when each user stores a fraction of the movie. With this in mind, the authors propose a distributed data structure called peer-graph in which each peer determines other peers having the previous or subsequent fractions of the movie and maintains pointers to these peers.