Abstract
Recently, P2P streaming has received much attention as a new technology for delivering multimedia content over the internet to the end-users on the periphery. This technology is inherent to the overlay network which is constructed by the logical connections among the end-users, which are known as (peers). Therefore, the management of peers (overlay) on top of the internet is an important aspect from the network point of view, which concerns distributing the load among the participant peers, maintaining the logical conne ctions between the senders and the receivers to pursue low communication latency, enhancing the throughput, and monitoring link failur e and churn of peers. In this paper, we are proposing a mechanism for the self-management of the overlay network connections amo ng the source peers. Our proposed mechanism is based on (1) clustering the peers; (2) active measurements of a logical distance me tric-round trip time (RTT)-between a receiving node and the other sender peers; and (3) periodical handover techniques. Our propos ed scheme has been implemented, tested, and verified using the ns-2 simulator. Our results show a significant improvement in load balancing and QoS. © 2009 IEEE.