ZIGZAG: an efficient peer-to-peer scheme for media streaming

TLDR

Efficient control protocols are required to maintain multicast trees in dynamic networks with unpredictable client behavior. The authors design ZIGZAG, a peer‑to‑peer scheme for single‑source media streaming. ZIGZAG builds an application‑layer multicast tree rooted at the server with logarithmic height and constant node degree, enabling scalable distribution. ZIGZAG reduces processing hops, keeps end‑to‑end delay low, incurs constant amortized control overhead, and supports graceful regional failure recovery.

Abstract

A peer-to-peer technique called ZIGZAG for single-source media streaming is designed . ZIGZAG allows the media server to distribute content to many clients by organizing them into an appropriate tree rooted at the server. This application-layer multicast tree has a height logarithmic with the number of clients and a node degree bounded by a constant. This helps reduce the number of processing hops on the delivery path to a client while avoiding network bottleneck. Consequently, the end-to-end delay is kept small. Although one could build a tree satisfying such properties easily, an efficient control protocol between the nodes must be in place to maintain the tree under the effects of network dynamics and unpredictable client behaviors. ZIGZAG handles such situations gracefully requiring a constant amortized control overhead. Especially, failure recovery can be done regionally with little impact on the existing clients and mostly no burden on the server.