In order to distribute multimedia content in peer-to-peer based approaches, all participants choose other peers as neighbors, thus spanning an overlay network of logical nodes and connecting edges. In building such an overlay for live multimedia streaming, two important properties of the evolving topologies have to be considered: The efficiency regarding the transmission cost in the network and the stability towards random node failures and deliberate attacks. The majority of existing approaches focuses on the construction of efficient overlays and only a few aim to achieve resilience towards the failure of nodes. Furthermore, no approaches exist which propose a satisfying solution to the creation of both efficient and stable topologies. In order to close this gap, this article presents a new approach for an adjustable construction of both efficient and stable overlay streaming topologies. For this purpose, the properties of stability and efficiency are formalized as a set of cost metrics and a distributed algorithm for dynamic construction of such topologies is introduced, which locally minimizes the total cost. A simulation study shows that this approach allows for a good trade-off between the construction of efficient and stable topologies.
Print ISSN: 1611-2776
Volume: 49, 05/2007
Pages: 304 - 311