An Autonomous Topology Management Framework

for QoS Enabled P2P Video Streaming Systems

Ihsan Ullah , Guillaume Doyen, Grégory Bonnet, Dominique Gaïti

ERA / Charles Delaunay Institute – UMR 6279

Troyes University of Technology
France

8th International Conference on Network and Service

Management (CNSM-2012)

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Outline
 Introduction

 Performance issues in P2P live streaming systems

 User behavior Models

 Autonomous topology management framework

 Experiments and results

 Conclusion and future work

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Introduction
 P2P live streaming systems
 Virtual networks of end-hosts
 Potentially scalable
 Easily deployable

 Stream delivery strategies

 Push-based
 Efficent in terms of timely delivery of content but fragile
against peers’ dynamics
 Pull-based
 Resilient against peers’ dynamics with increased delay
 Hybrid
 Attempt to combine the advantages of both
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 Performance issues in P2P live streaming systems

 Problem statement
 Peers relay content
 Peers are controlled by users
 User arrive and leave freely which can lead to service disruption
 Current approaches attempt to counter it through resilient
overlays and large buffers, which incur an important overhead
and degrade streaming quality (increased delays)

 Our proposal
 User centric approach
 Anticipation of user departure
 Autonomous management for improved quality
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 Autonomous Topology Management
Framework
 Monitor: Data collection
 Local: Time, content type, etc Autonomic element
 Global: Popularity, Arrival, departure Autonomic Manager
(decentralized aggregation protocol) Analyze Plan

 Analyze: User behavior models Knowledge

Monitor Execute
 Plan: Replacement selection
 Execute: Swap processing Sensors Effectors
algorithm
Managed Element

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Non-contextual user behavior models
 Consider only the history of session durations
 Estimate the length of the current session through two
methods
 Exponential Moving Average (EMA)
 Estimates an average by assigning exponentially decreasing
weights to older sessions
 Bayes’ Rule (BR)
 Estimates the probability that the current session duration will be
equal to some length
 [ullah et al. MMNS 2009]

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 Contextual user behavior model
 A Bayesian network model
derived from a synthesis of
user behavior measurements
 Can estimate several
parameters such as session
duration and popularity
 Considers all the contextual
information that can impact
user behavior
 [Ullah et al. IM 2011]

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Selection & replacement (1/3)
 Using estimations of non-contextual and
contextual models to stabilize the P2P topology
 Previous approach: [ullah et al. MMNS 09]
 Receiver driven strategy
 Attempts to move the content receiving peer to a
stable provider before the departure of its current one
 Does not always guaranty a move due to
unavailability of a stable provider with sufficient
outgoing capacity

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Selection & replacement (2/3)
 Criteria for a new approach
 The approach should be decentralized to avoid
scalability issues
 The overhead should be kept small
 The approach should not impact other performance
parameters negatively (startup and playback delay)
 Hypothesis
 Peers cooperate in providing their stability
information to each other in order to self-organize
the topology

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Selection & replacement (3/3)
 A sender driven approach
 An unstable content provider peer replaces itself by
the most stable peer among its child peers
 Moves itself to the leaf of the tree
 Moving of the unstable peer towards the outskirts is
guaranteed
 The impact of departure is minimized

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Peer selection
Request remaining time from all child peers

Receive responses and make their list

Choose the most stable child and add

it to the potential parents list

Query the most stable child for its children

and them to the potential parents list
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Executing the swap

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Experimental framework
P2P System Scribe (FreePastry)
No. of PlanetLab nodes 60
Deployment and monitoring PlanetLab Experiment Manager (PIMan)
Bitrate 64 Kbps
Out-degree limit of each peer 3
No. of distinct experiments 4
1 for WS Scribe without any stabilization strategy
1 for EMA Stabilization strategy relying on estimations
of Exponential Moving Average
1 for BR Stabilization strategy relying on estimations
of Bayes’ rule
1 for BN Stabilization strategy relying on estimations
of Bayesian network
Duration of each experiment 2 hours
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Workload generation for individual users
 Complete workloads of individual users do not exist
 Measurements present model for aggregated behaviors
 Sociological approaches lack formalism (Personas)
 We proposed a semi-Markovian model for individual users [Bonnet
et al. NTMS’11]
 Is based on personas defined in sociological approaches [Rudstrom et
al. 2008]
 Is consistent with aggregated models
 Each user belongs to one of the six personas each of which represents
a different behavior

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Experimental results
 During each experiment, we analyze
 Peers’ population
 Packet losses
 Control overhead
 Average playback delays
 Buffering delays

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Peers’ population

 All experiments were run over

the same set of traces
 Population show similar pattern
for all experiments
 Small differences may occur
due to operational failures

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Packet losses

 A packet that misses the playback deadline is considered lost

 Packet losses increase around one hour time that shows the
departure of peers at higher levels
 Stabilization strategy reduces packet losses of Scribe by 89%,
with BN, by 38% with EMA and by 30% with BR
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Control overhead (# of messages)

 The overhead with BN is larger than with other models

 However, overall it remains less than 15 messages per
minute for all the peers, which is a small overhead
 Since, the strategy requires to exchange messages with
a few nodes around the unstable node, the system size 18
has no big impact on the overhead
Average playback delays

 Average playback delays with 95% confidence interval

 Most of the times delay remains under 15 seconds
 For BN the delay is a little higher than other approaches in
the second hour
 However, with BN a larger number of packets is received
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before the playback deadline
Packets meeting the deadline

 With BN, consistently a larger number of packets meet

the playback deadlines
 Larger delays actually occurred due to churn
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Buffering delay

 With BN the buffering delay remains lower

 Remains under 6 seconds for BN in 90% of cases, for WS 69% of
cases, for EMA 71 % of cases and for BR 79% of cases 21
Results summary
 The stabilization strategy reduces packet losses
significantly
 Other performance parameters such as delay
are not impacted negatively
 The overhead of the strategy is small
 Relying on the estimations of the contextual
model produces overall better results

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Conclusion and future perspectives
 Conclusion
 Integration of user behavior models in P2P live streaming
systems to improve their service quality
 An autonomous topology management framework for push
based systems
 Moving continuously the unstable peers towards the leaves of
the tree
 Evaluation over PlanetLab shows significant improvement
 Future perspectives
 Inclusion of other performance metrics such as bandwidth
contribution and streaming quality
 Application to pull-based and hybrid systems
 Extension to management functional areas such as capacity
planning 23
Thank you for your attention…

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