Efficient algorithms for multi-sender data transmission in swarm-based peer-to-peer streaming systems

In peer-to-peer (P2P) swarm-based streaming systems, each video sequence is typically divided into segments, which are then streamed from multiple senders to a receiver. The receiver needs to coordinate the senders by specifying a transmission schedule for each of them. Our goal is to compute the transmission schedules in order to maximize the video quality at the receivers. We prove that this problem is NP-Complete. We present an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for this problem. This optimal solution, however is computationally expensive and is not suitable for real-time streaming systems. Thus, we propose an approximation algorithm to solve this problem, which has an approximation factor of 2. We implement the proposed algorithm in a P2P simulator and in a P2P prototype system. Our evaluation results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms deployed in current systems.