Reviving Peer-to-Peer Networking for Scalable Crowdsourced Live Video Streaming

The rising crowdsourced live video streaming (CLVS) poses great challenges to Internet transport scalability, where a broadcaster's live video is expected to reach thousands and even millions of viewers in real time. To accommodate such huge concurrent video traffic, the de-facto solution is to employ content delivery network (CDN), which distributes the traffic spatially relative to end viewers, using geographically distributed servers. However, our measurement study over a top operational CLVS platform reveals that CDN is not scalable enough, i.e., it loses efficacy, particularly during busy time and leads to tremendous QoE degradation, e.g., 33.3% video bitrate reduction, in comparison to network idle time. In this work, we propose Spider, which revives the peer-to-peer (P2P) networking principle to extend the scalability of CLVS system. Beyond traditional P2P for elastic data transmission, Spider retrofits P2P to meet the stringent low-latency requirements of CLVS: proposing a "pair-push" streaming mode to tame the excessive signaling latency; designing a QoE-driven peer pairing algorithm to tackle the Internet path variation and CLVS viewer dynamics. We implement, deploy and evaluate Spider in real-world over 20.9 thousand video sessions. Compared to the de-facto CDN solution, Spider achieves remarkable gains, e.g., video stall rate reductions of 52.57%, video quality gains of 8.22%, and even 66% CDN bandwidth saving. The results validate the feasibility and practicability of embracing P2P for low-latency live video communication for the first time.