Abstract :

P2P has shown enormous potential in delivering live streaming of content for IPTV, Video-on-Demand and video conferencing. The fundamental problem of P2P streaming is its streaming capacity problem, which is the maximum supported streaming rate by a given P2P system. This problem has been solved for small networks, where any two nodes can download/upload to each other. However, the stream capacity remains unclear for large networks with topology or/and peering constraints. We first considered the peering constraints by upper bounding the outgoing degree of each multicast tree, and we derived the streaming capacity and the designed the algorithms to achieve the capacity. We then took topology constraints into consideration, and developed the first unifying framework, and approximation algorithms that can approach the streaming capacity of a general P2P network over arbitrary overlay topology, number of streaming sessions, and peer selection constraints. The study of P2P streaming capacity not only establishes a benchmark of any P2P system performance, but also brings insight on designing a practically implementable, throughput and delay efficient protocol for ISP controlled peer-assisted streaming system.

Biography :

Shao Liu received B.S. degree from Peking University, Beijing, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his advisors are Prof. R. Srikant and Prof. Tamer Basar. He is currently with Princeton University, where he is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering, advised by Prof. Mung Chiang. He is also a visiting researcher in CCS group of Microsoft Research, advised by Dr. Jin Li and Dr. Phil Chou, and he once was a summer Intern in Microsoft Research Cambridge, working with Dr. Milan Vojnovic. His research interests include congestion control for communication networks, peer-to-peer streaming systems, with applications like IPTV, Video on Demand and Video Conferencing, service differentiation and quality of service, rate control for real-time streaming traffic, etc. His recent work includes the design of TCP-Illinois protocol and the analysis on the fundamental performance bounds for peer-to-peer living streaming systems. His email address is shaoliu@princeton.edu, and more information on his recent and past projects is available at http://www.princeton.edu/~shaoliu