CollectCast: A peer-to-peer service for media streaming

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2010

With advances in the broadband Internet access technology and the coding techniques, video streaming services have become increasingly popular. Traditionally, video streaming services are deployed in the client/server architecture. However, this centralized architecture cannot provide streaming to a large population of users due to the limited upload capacity from the server. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has recently become a promising approach to provide live streaming services or Video-on-Demand (VoD) services to a huge number of the concurrent users over a global area. P2P streaming systems can be classified into P2P live streaming systems and P2P VoD systems. In a P2P live streaming system, a live video is disseminated to all users in real time. The video playbacks on all users are synchronized. In a P2P VoD system, users can choose any video they like and start to watch it at any time. The playbacks of the same video on different users are not synchronized. Depending on the approaches of overlay constructions, P2P live streaming systems can be categorized into tree-based P2P live streaming systems and mesh-based P2P live streaming systems. In tree-based P2P live streaming systems, the video streams are delivered over a single application-layer tree or multiple application-layer trees. In mesh-based P2P live streaming systems, each peer exchanges the data with a set of neighbors. VoD services provide more flexibility and interactivity to users. Depending on the forwarding approaches, P2P VoD systems can be categorized into buffer-forwarding systems, storage-forwarding systems, and hybrid-forwarding systems. In P2P VoD systems, prefetching scheme enables peers to download the future segments which are away from the current playback position, thus increasing the playback continuity.

2010

Abstract—P2P streaming tries to achieve scalability (like P2P file distribution) and at the same time meet real-time playback requirements. It is a challenging problem still not well understood. In this paper, we describe a simple stochastic model that can be used to compare different downloading strategies with random peer selection. Based on this model, we study the tradeoffs between supported peer population, buffer size and playback continuity. We first study two simple strategies: Rarest First and Greedy.

2002

We design a peer-to-peer technique called ZIGZAG for single-source media streaming. ZIGZAG allows the media server to distribute content to many clients by organizing them into an appropriate tree rooted at the server. This applicationlayer multicast tree has a height logarithmic with the number of clients and a node degree bounded by a constant. This helps reduce the number of processing hops on the delivery path to a client while avoiding network bottleneck. Consequently, the end-to-end delay is kept small. Although one could build a tree satisfying such properties easily, an efficient control protocol between the nodes must be in place to maintain the tree under the effects of network dynamics and unpredictable client behaviors. ZIGZAG handles such situations gracefully requiring a constant amortized control overhead. Especially, failure recovery can be done regionally with little impact on the existing clients and mostly no burden on the server. 0-7803-7753-2/03/$17.00 (C)

This paper present a thorough and homogeneous comparison of chunk and peer selection strategies suitable for mesh-based, live, P2P streaming applications. Strategies are studied in a context of push protocols, and it is shown that none of the schedulers analyzed, which are, to the best of our knowledge, the majority of those proposed in the literature, offer acceptable performances on a range of scenarios commonly encountered in networks. Results also show that the key weakness is in the peer selection strategy. Based on these observations, we propose a new peer selection strategy which blends together an optimal peer selection for homogeneous networks with a bandwidth aware approach. Extended experiments show that under all the scenarios considered this peer scheduler performs consistently better than all the others, specially when coupled with a deadline-based, robust chunk selection strategy.

Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM'06), 2006

A multimedia contents are distributed to peers and a contents peer which holds contents can provide other peers with the contents in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. Multimedia streaming is more significant than downloading ways in multimedia applications from security and economical reasons. We discuss distributed multi-source streaming models. Here, a collection of multiple contents peers in parallel transmit packets of a multimedia content to a leaf peer to realize the reliability and scalability. Even if not only some number of peers stop by fault and are degraded in performance but also some number of packets are lost and delayed, a leaf peer can receive a content at the required rate. We discuss how to allocate packets to each contents peer. We discuss a gossipbased, DAG-based coordination protocol (DCoP) to synchronize multiple contents peers. We evaluate DCoP in terms of how long it takes and how many messages are transmitted to synchronize multiple contents peers.

19Th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Volume 1, 2005

A peer-to-peer (P2P) network is composed of large number of peer computers which are cooperating by exchanging messages in networks. In multimedia streaming applications, multimedia data is required to be efficiently and reliably delivered to processes in a real-time manner. In order to support scalable and reliable multimedia streaming service, we newly discuss a multi-source streaming way where multiple source peers transmit packets of multimedia content to each peer. Here, each of the source peers transmits different packets with some redundancy to the peer in order to be tolerant of some number of faulty peers and packets lost.

The recent global demand for video streaming applications has paved the way for peer-to-peer streaming system (P2PSS). Strategic scheduling scheme and dynamic overlay topology are essential to maintain quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) in P2PSS. The concept of P2PSS was tailored towards relying on active peers' bandwidth to achieve cheap and scalable means of distribution over the Internet, such that peers with highest bandwidth serve as backbones for others. However, selecting backbone peers in low-capacity network environment is challenging due to insufficient bandwidth and poor infrastructure, thereby resulting in poor QoS and unpleasant user's QoE. In this paper, we conducted a survey on users' experiences with live video in selected locations in Nigeria. We designed an adaptive P2P streaming protocol and performed a packet-level simulation in Network Simulator 3(NS-3). Diverse simulation scenarios were set up to evaluate the proposed streaming protocol. Trace files data were analysed to measure end-to-end delay, start-up delay, and throughput. Furthermore, the proposed streaming protocol was benchmarked against selected existing schemes. The evaluation results revealed a 7.4% and 28% reduction in start-up and in end-to-end delays and 9% increase in throughput. Keywords Peer-to-peer networks • Video streaming • Quality of Service • Quality of experience • Low-capacity networks 1 Introduction The evolution of the Internet has enabled the rapid growth of multimedia systems ranging from simple music downloading to watching television over the Internet [1]. Research has revealed that, over the last two decades, watching/streaming video applications are the most popular on-line activities [2, 3]. For instance, the popular Netflix is reportedly streaming over 1 billion hours of video per month which is equivalent to about 7,200,000 Tera bytes of video Oluwafolake E. Ojo