Tight Bounds on the Upload Capacity to Enable Two-Hop Delivery in Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Systems

In multi-tree-structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video streaming, video streams are delivered from the source peer to subscribing peers in such a way that each stream is divided into several sub-streams and those sub-streams are delivered through different spanning trees. In this paper, we focus on the delivery of all sub-streams to [Formula: see text] subscribers through spanning trees of depth two each, which will be referred to as the 2-hop delivery of sub-streams. The main contribution of the current paper is the derivation of a tight lower bound on the upload capacity of homogeneous peers so that 2-hop delivery is possible if and only if the upload capacity of each peer is greater than or equal to the derived bound.