BulkTree: An overlay network architecture for live media streaming

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are now very popular. Current P2P systems are broadly of two kinds, structured and unstructured. The tree structured P2P systems used technologies such as distributed hash tables (DHT) and hierarchical clustering can search the required target quickly, however, in a tree, the internal node has a higher load and its leave or crash often causes a large population of its offspring’s problems, so that in the highly dynamic Internet environment the tree structure may still suffer frequent breaks. On the other hand, most widely used unstructured P2P networks rely on central directory servers or massive message flooding, clearly not scalable. So, we consider both of the above systems’ advantages and disadvantages and realize that in the P2P systems on node may fail easily, but that when a number of nodes organized as a set, which we call “super node”, the set is robust. Super nodes can be created and updated aware of topology-aware, and used with simple protocol such as flooding or “servers” to exchange information. Furthermore the entire robust super node can be organized into exquisite tree structure. By using this overlay network architecture, P2P systems are robust, efficient, scalable and secure. The simulation results demonstrated that our architecture greatly reduces the alteration time of the structure while decreasing the average delay time, compared to the common tree structure.