Resource management and multimedia support in peer-to-peer systems

The growing interest in Internet has resulted in an increasing deployment of parallel and distributed applications over wide area environments. While the traditional client-server model is limited by the numbers of concurrent users it can support and the need for dedicated servers, the new emerging Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model offers an attractive alternative for developing large scale applications that share processing and computing resources among computer nodes on wide area networks.; In this thesis, we investigate how distributed real-time multimedia applications that require both processing and communication can be supported on peer-to-peer systems. We first propose a novel distributed and dynamic resource utilization based urgency (RUBEN) scheduling algorithm whose goal is to maximize the probability that the real-time applications meet their deadlines. Next we extend this work and study scenarios in which a multimedia streaming session consists of multiple sub-streaming paths and the streaming receiver's quality-of-service requirements need to be coordinated through feedback information to streaming source nodes and transcoding nodes. In the last chapter, we study another class of distributed applications that require real-time data dissemination among interested receivers in order to maintain a consistent application view. We demonstrate how to utilize filtering techniques to reduce message overhead in such scenarios while maintaining acceptable consistency ratio for the participating peers.