Epidemic live streaming

TLDR

Peer‑to‑peer live‑streaming systems such as CoolStreaming, PPLive, and SopCast use epidemic‑style dissemination, yet their fundamental performance trade‑offs remain poorly understood. This work presents several results that advance the understanding of these trade‑offs.

Abstract

Several peer-to-peer systems for live streaming have been recently deployed (e.g. CoolStreaming, PPLive, SopCast). These all rely on distributed, epidemic-style dissemination mechanisms. Despite their popularity, the fundamental performance trade-offs of such mechanisms are still poorly understood. In this paper we propose several results that contribute to the understanding of such trade-offs.