Hose rate control for P2P-TV streaming systems

In this paper we consider mesh based P2P streaming systems focusing on the problem of regulating peer upload rate to match the system demand while not overloading each peer upload link capacity. We propose Hose Rate Control (HRC), a novel scheme to control the speed at which peers offer chunks to other peers, ultimately controlling peer uplink capacity utilization. This is of critical importance for heterogeneous scenarios like the one faced in the Internet, where peer upload capacity is unknown and varies widely. HRC nicely adapts to the actual peer available upload bandwidth and system demand, so that users' Quality of Experience is greatly enhanced. Both simulations and actual experiments involving up to 1000 peers are presented to assess performance in real scenarios. Results show that HRC consistently outperforms the Quality of Experience achieved by non-adaptive schemes.