A Survey on Adaptive Multimedia Streaming

Internet was primarily designed for one to one applications like electronic mail, reliable file transfer etc. However, the technological growth in both hardware and software industry have written in unprecedented success story of the growth of Internet and have paved the paths of modern digital evolution. In today’s world, the internet has become the way of life and has penetrated in its every domain. It is nearly impossible to list the applications which make use of internet in this era however, all these applications are data intensive and data may be textual, audio or visual requiring improved techniques to deal with these. Multimedia applications are one of them and have witnessed unprecedented growth in last few years. A predominance of that is by virtue of different video streaming applications in daily life like games, education, entertainment, security etc. Due to the huge demand of multimedia applications, heterogeneity of demands and limited resource availability there is a dire need of adaptive multimedia streaming. This chapter provides the detail discussion over different adaptive multimedia streaming mechanism over peer to peer network

Reducing BitTorrent Download Time via Handshake-Based Switching

Peer-to-peer networking overcomes the single point of failure and bandwidth limitations inherent to the centralized server model of file-sharing. It is both a popular means of sharing digital content and a major consumer of internet traffic, with BitTorrent being the most-used protocol. As such, significant research has gone into improving peer-to-peer performance in order to reduce both download times and networking costs. One aspect that can affect performance is the client’s selection of peers to download from, as the time spent downloading from even a single poor-performing peer can impact the overall download duration. A recent peer selection strategy explored having a client use historical knowledge acquired through third-party sources, as well as its own first-hand experience with previously visited peers, as a means of selecting likely good-performers, coupled with a peer switching strategy that replaced peers whose post-selection downloads exhibited poor performance contrary to what historical knowledge suggested in order to limit the time spent downloading from said poor-performers Though this tactic demonstrated reduced download times compared to various past works, it still suffered from poor peer selection due to its historical knowledge not necessarily reflecting the current state of the peers. This work introduced and examined an enhancement to this hybrid peer selection and switching strategy by adding current intelligence regarding a peer’s available bandwidth, all the while avoiding the additional network costs associated with performing on-the-fly probing or querying techniques utilized by other peer selection strategies to benchmark prospective peers. With such on-the-fly knowledge about a peer’s current bandwidth availability, this new enhanced strategy quickly replaced poor performers without waiting for downloads to be performed and subsequently benchmarked, resulting in reduced overall peer-to-peer download times. The results of adding this pre-download peer switching enhancement demonstrated improved download performance, particularly in early file transfer runs. However, as more runs occurred and the benefits of the original strategy’s historical knowledge became more pronounced, the time savings gained from this new enhancement diminished

Reducing the Download Time in Stochastic P2P Content Delivery Networks by Improving Peer Selection

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have become a popular method for obtaining digital content. Recent research has shown that the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer effects the total download duration. Current peer selection strategies attempt to limit the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer, but they do not use both advanced knowledge and service capacity after the connection has been made to aid in peer selection. Advanced knowledge has traditionally been obtained from methods that add additional overhead to the P2P network, such as polling peers for service capacity information, using round trip time techniques to calculate the distance between peers, and by using tracker peers. This work investigated the creation of a new download strategy that replaced the random selection of peers with a method that selects server peers based on historic service capacity and ISP in order to further reduce the amount of time needed to complete a download session. Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have become a popular method for obtaining digital content. Recent research has shown that the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer effects the total download duration. Current peer selection strategies attempt to limit the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer, but they do not use both advanced knowledge and service capacity after the connection has been made to aid in peer selection. Advanced knowledge has traditionally been obtained from methods that add additional overhead to the P2P network, such as polling peers for service capacity information, using round trip time techniques to calculate the distance between peers, and by using tracker peers. This work investigated the creation of a new download strategy that replaced the random selection of peers with a method that selects server peers based on historic service capacity and ISP in order to further reduce the amount of time needed to complete a download session. The results of this new historic based peer selection strategy have shown that there are benefits in using advanced knowledge to select peers and only replacing the worst performing peers. This new approach showed an average download duration improvement of 16.6% in the single client simulation and an average cross ISP traffic reduction of 55.17% when ISPs were participating in cross ISP throttling. In the multiple clients simulation the new approach showed an average download duration improvement of 53.31% and an average cross ISP traffic reduction of 88.83% when ISPs were participating in cross ISP throttling. This new approach also significantly improved the consistency of the download duration between download sessions allowing for the more accurate prediction of download times

Recent Trends in Communication Networks

In recent years there has been many developments in communication technology. This has greatly enhanced the computing power of small handheld resource-constrained mobile devices. Different generations of communication technology have evolved. This had led to new research for communication of large volumes of data in different transmission media and the design of different communication protocols. Another direction of research concerns the secure and error-free communication between the sender and receiver despite the risk of the presence of an eavesdropper. For the communication requirement of a huge amount of multimedia streaming data, a lot of research has been carried out in the design of proper overlay networks. The book addresses new research techniques that have evolved to handle these challenges