Abstract
Streaming video over the Internet, including cellular networks, has now become a commonplace. Network operators typically use multicasting or variants of multiple unicasting to deliver streams to the user terminal in a controlled fashion. P2P streaming is an emerging alternative, which is theoretically more scalable but suffers from other issues arising from the dynamic nature of the system. Users' terminals become streaming nodes but they are not constantly connected. Another issue is that they are based on logical overlays, which are not optimized for the physical underlay infrastructure. An important proposition is to find effective ways to increase the resilience of the overlay whilst at the same time not conflicting with the network. In this article we look at the combination of two techniques, redundant streaming and locality awareness, in the context of both live and video-on-demand streaming. We introduce a new technique and assess it via a comparative, simulation-based study. We find that redundancy affects network utilization only marginally if traffic is kept at the edges via localization techniques.