Design and Evaluation of an Optimized Overlay Topology for a Single Operator Video Streaming Service

The peer selection approaches used in state-of-the-art P2P live streaming applications do not take into account the underlying physical network parameters. By localizing P2P live streaming traffic with respect to the network layer topology, operators could save backbone transmission costs. This would allow an important reduction in OPEX while at the same time speeding up the content diffusion. Considering a single operator intra-domain scenario, this paper proposes an optimization procedure for the creation of the overlay topology exploiting information provided by an Oracle-like device. The main feature of the proposed solution is the ability to take into account different physical network parameters, summarized in the proposed cost function. The simulation study highlights the impact on the overlay system performance of different cost function configurations, and of the heterogeneity of the physical links utilization.