  In recent years, research efforts tried to exploit peer-to-peer (P2P) systems
in order to provide Live Streaming (LS) and Video-on-Demand (VoD) services.
Most of these research efforts focus on the development of distributed P2P
block schedulers for content exchange among the participating peers and on the
characteristics of the overlay graph (P2P overlay) that interconnects the set
of these peers. Currently, researchers try to combine peer-to-peer systems with
cloud infrastructures. They developed monitoring and control architectures that
use resources from the cloud in order to enhance QoS and achieve an attractive
trade-off between stability and low cost operation. However, there is a lack of
research effort on the congestion control of these systems and the existing
congestion control architectures are not suitable for P2P live streaming
traffic (small sequential non persistent traffic towards multiple network
locations). This paper proposes a P2P live streaming traffic aware congestion
control protocol that: i) is capable to manage sequential traffic heading to
multiple network destinations , ii) efficiently exploits the available
bandwidth, iii) accurately measures the idle peer resources, iv) avoids network
congestion, and v) is friendly to traditional TCP generated traffic. The
proposed P2P congestion control has been implemented, tested and evaluated
through a series of real experiments powered across the BonFIRE infrastructure.
