A Comparative Study for Rate Allocation in Multi-source Systems with Same Rate Stream

Demand for content distribution has increased significantly during last years. Content distribution systems are affected by scalability and dynamicity issues. This paper presents a comparative analytical study for rate allocation in a multi-source multicast framework based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm. This framework distributes multiple contents to all requesting peers exploiting full collaboration between the sources and the requesting peers. Each source distributes its own content blocks while additionally forwarding the content received from other sources. The requesting peers forward blocks of data received from the sources to the other peers. Our study compare the performance of two strategies to distribute same rate stream: Sources with independent rate allocation and sources with joint rate allocation. The rate allocation and redistribution assignments that maximize the overall throughput for both scenarios are analyzed. This study can help to decide which scenario is most suitable for the multi-source multicast framework.