| Summary: | Peer-to-peer streaming has emerged as a killer application in today's Internet, delivering a large variety of live multimedia content to millions of users at any given time with low server cost. Though successfully deployed, the efficiency and optimality of the current peer-to-peer streaming protocols are still less than satisfactory. In this thesis, we investigate optimizing solutions to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art mesh-based peer-to-peer streaming systems, utilizing both theoretical performance modeling and extensive real-world measurements. First, we model peer-to-peer streaming applications in both the single-overlay and multi-overlay scenarios, based on the solid foundation of optimization and game theories. Using these models, we design efficient and fully decentralized solutions to achieve performance optimization in peer-to-peer streaming. Then, based on a large volume of live measurements from a commercial large-scale peer-to-peer streaming application, we extensively study the real-world performance of peer-to-peer streaming over a long period of time. Highlights of our measurement study include the topological characterization of large-scale streaming meshes, the statistical characterization of inter-peer bandwidth availability, and the investigation of server capacity utilization in peer-to-peer streaming. Utilizing in-depth insights from our measurements, we design practical algorithms that advance the performance of key protocols in peer-to-peer live streaming. We show that our optimizing solutions fulfill their design objectives in various realistic scenarios, using extensive simulations and experiments.
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