EagleMacaw: A Dual-Tree Replication Protocol for Efficient and Reliable P2P Media Streaming

This paper introduces EAGLEMACAW, a replication-based protocol for streaming media content to consumers in P2P systems, in an efficient and reliable manner. To guarantee efficiency and reliability, EAGLEMACAW adaptively replicates media content in different peers while streaming to consumers. In addition, two distinct trees, named EAGLE TREE and MACAW TREE, are built on top of an overlay network to route media content to consumers. The EAGLE TREE is built based on efficiency metrics while the MACAW TREE is constructed based on reliability metrics. The EAGLE TREE is used as a main routing path for streaming media content to consumers with the goal of using the network resources in an efficient manner. As soon as a partitioning occurs in the EAGLE TREE, the MACAW TREE is used as a temporary path to continue streaming to consumers. Both these trees are built in a distributed manner, which ensures the scalability of the approach. Our performance evaluation shows that in an unreliable environment, over 90% of consumers on average are served via the EAGLE TREE. It also shows that when partitioning occurs in the EAGLE TREE, by switching to the MACAW TREE, consumers are capable of consuming around 50% more media content on average than they would in absence of the MACAW TREE.