Peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming systems have recently received significant attention, with commercial deployment gaining increased popularity in the Internet. It is evident from our experiences with real-world systems that, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of users trying to join a program in the first few minutes of a live broadcast. This phenomenon in streaming systems, referred to as the flash crowd, poses unique challenges in the system design. In this thesis, we first characterizing impact of various neighbor size, namely the number of neighbors of each peer, which is usually suspected to be a determining factor for performance fluctuation during flash crowds. However, our analytical results shows the surprising result that resilience to flash crowds benefits lit...[ Read more ]

Peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming systems have recently received significant attention, with commercial deployment gaining increased popularity in the Internet. It is evident from our experiences with real-world systems that, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of users trying to join a program in the first few minutes of a live broadcast. This phenomenon in streaming systems, referred to as the flash crowd, poses unique challenges in the system design. In this thesis, we first characterizing impact of various neighbor size, namely the number of neighbors of each peer, which is usually suspected to be a determining factor for performance fluctuation during flash crowds. However, our analytical results shows the surprising result that resilience to flash crowds benefits little from increasing the neighbor size beyond a small threshold (typically 5).

We then propose a population control strategy to alleviate the flash crowds. In particular, we show that there is a fundamental upper bound on the system scale with respect to a time constraint. By trading peer startup delays in the initial stage of a flash crowd for system scale, we design a simple and flexible population control framework with theoretical insights and practical guidelines. Our theoretical and numerical analysis verifies that an appropriate population control scheme do help alleviate the performance fluctuation during flash crowds. In addition, our analysis has brought forth an in-depth understanding on effects of the gossip protocol and peer churn.