Gradient-Descent Scheduler - A network-aware transmission scheduler for server-less video streaming systems

Recently, a server-less architecture has been proposed for building video streaming systems which does not need any costly dedicated video servers and yet is highly scalable and reliable. However, due to the potentially large number of user hosts streaming video data to a receiver for playback, the aggregate network traffic can become very bursty, leading to significant packet loss at the access routers. This study tackles this problem by investigating a novel network-aware transmission scheduling algorithm called Gradient-Descent Scheduler (GDS) to reduce the traffic burstiness. Simulation results will demonstrate that GDS can reduce the congestion-induced packet loss from over 95% to 0.07% in a 500-host system. Moreover, GDS can automatically adapt to the underlying network and does not require hosts in the system to be synchronized. These are essential for practical design of server-less architectures and peer-to-peer systems.