An Integrated Prefetching/Caching Scheme for P2P Live Streaming

In this paper, we propose a buffering scheme to improve the performance in P2P live streaming systems by adjusting the ratio of caching and prefetching portion of each peer. To this end, we assign all the peers into many groups depending on their playback periods. We then determine the ratio of caching and prefetching portion in each peer depending on its playback time position relative to those of other peers within the same group. In other words, as the playback position of a peer gets later, we increase the ratio of its caching portion. On the contrary, as the playback position of a peer gets eariler, we increase the ratio of its prefetching portion. This can significantly increase the degree of data duplication among peers that belong to each specific group. By simulation experiments, we show that our proposed an integrated prefetching/caching scheme can improve the performance considerably in terms of jitter ratio, initial playback delay and shared buffermap ratio when compared to the existing fixed portion buffering scheme.