Controlling the provision of resources for streaming of video swarms in a peer-to-peer network

A system for providing streaming multimedia content in a peer-to-peer network, comprising:

• a broadcasting server for broadcasting a channel of the streaming multimedia content;
• a plurality of nodes that can act either as consumer nodes for viewing the channel or resource nodes for streaming multimedia content of the channel;
• and
• a management server for allocating an initial number of resource nodes from the plurality of nodes to provide a desired level of quality of service (QoS) to the channel and thereafter determining, based on a predicted number of consumer nodes, if a change in the number of initial allocated number of resource nodes is needed;
• wherein the management server, the broadcasting server, and the plurality of nodes are connected to a network.

A server for controlling the provision of resource nodes for streaming multimedia content of a channel viewed by consumer nodes in a peer-to-peer network, comprising:

• a processor;
• a memory for containing instructions that when executed by the processor cause the processor to perform the steps of:
• initializing the channel with an initial number of resource nodes allocated to provide a desired level of quality of service (QoS) to the consumer nodes, the resource nodes and the consumer nodes are part of the peer-to-peer network;
• checking periodically a number of consumer nodes currently connected to the channel and an experienced QoS level of the channel;
• predicting, based on the number of the consumer nodes currently connected, an increase trend or a decrease trend in the number of consumer nodes, and the experienced level of QoS level, a number of predicted consumer nodes of the channel and a predicted number of resource nodes required to provide the desired level of QoS;
• and
• changing the number of resource nodes allocated to the channel to provide the desired level of QoS and to meet the number of predicted consumer nodes.