A comparative study of tree-based and mesh-based overlay P2P media streaming

Streaming media technology has seen tremendous growth and is currently a popular research area. While most of the work on streaming media technology is on ensuring the quality of the video playback and the scalability of the overall media streaming solution, there are few researches that are being conducted to address the limitations of the network, computer hardware nor the streaming media characteristics. These are the other factors that causes network capacity bottleneck. It is generally accepted that a Peer-to-Peer network is suitable for streaming media network and these can be classified into two main network architectures; a tree-based architecture and a mesh-based architecture. In this paper, we investigate and evaluate the network limitations between a Peer-to-Peer tree-based architecture and the more popular mesh-based architecture for media streaming performance. The simulations were conducted under various real-world scenarios and evaluated using different critical performance metrics that affects the reliability of the streaming quality and performance.