Load balancing for multimedia streaming in heterogeneous peer-to-peer systems

Multimedia streaming of mostly user generated content is an ongoing trend, not only since the upcoming of Last.fm and YouTube. A distributed decentralized multimedia streaming architecture can spread the (traffic) costs to the user nodes, but requires to provide for load balancing and consider the heterogeneity of the participating nodes. We propose a DHT-based information gathering and analyzing architecture which controls the streaming request assignment in the system and thoroughly evaluate it in comparison to a distributed stateless strategy. We evaluated the impact of the key parameters in the allocation function which considers the capabilities of the nodes and their contribution to the system. Identifying the quality-bandwidth tradeoffs of the information gathering system, we show that with our proposed system a 53% better load balancing can be reached and the efficiency of the system is significantly improved.