Red-black tree architecture for P2P media streaming

With the recent surge of Internet enabled portable devices, such as smart phones and tablets, it has resulted in a much faster growth of the global Internet usage. Most of the usage is due to the use of social media platforms where streaming media is used heavily. Most of the researches conducted were to address the issues related to overall delivered quality in a resource-constraint streaming environment as well as the issues related to the scalability of the overall media streaming system. While there are other areas of research that have seen significant work in addressing the limitations posed by the current network infrastructure, devices capabilities and also on the characteristics of the streaming media themselves. These research projects address different factors that lead to alleviating network capacity bottlenecks. The success of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems inspired the development of P2P streaming systems for delivering online multimedia service in the last few years. P2P networks are broadly categorized into two main network architecture; a tree-based architecture and a mesh-based architecture. Despite the advantages offered by tree-based streaming architecture, it is lacking in maintaining a balanced tree architecture which is needed to ensure a consistent quality of service. In this paper, we investigate and evaluate our proposed red-black tree-based streaming architecture as compared to a traditional tree-based architecture for media streaming performance. The simulations were conducted under various real-world scenarios and evaluated using different critical performance metrics that affect the overall streaming quality and performance.