| In this work, we present a peer-to-peer (P2P) multicast system for broadcasting high bandwidth streams to large numbers of heterogeneous and transient users. A scalable swarm-based P2P scheme is introduced, which does not maintain a rigid logical topology. Instead peers self-organize into an unstructured overlay in an ad-hoc fashion. A credit-based incentive mechanism is proposed to encourage peers to contribute their upload capacity. The proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations in a dynamic and heterogeneous environment. We find that it is able to operate under resource-constrained conditions where traditional tree-based approaches typically fail. At the end, we demonstrate the feasibility of our design by implementing an operational P2P prototype system for live streaming. |
