Segment Tree Based Control Plane Protocol for Peer-to-Peer On-Demand Streaming Service Discovery

With the intensifying academic interest in video streaming over peer-to-peer(P2P) network, more and more streaming protocols have been proposed to address different problems, such as QoS, load balancing, transmission reliability, bandwidth effciency, etc. However, to the best of our knowledge, an important component of any practical P2P streaming system, the streaming service discovery, which is to discover potential peers from which a newcomer could receive the requested stream, is rarely granted particular consideration. In this paper, we are inspired from a special data structure, namely Segment Tree(ST), and propose a protocol to address this problem. Furthermore, we fully decouple the control plane and data plane in video streaming, and hence provide more flexibilities in designing protocols on both of them.