Video-on-Demand over Internet: a survey of existing systems and solutions

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client/server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services, so there have been many proposals of systems, mostly based on a peer-to-peer or on a hybrid server/peer-to-peer solution, to solve this issue. This work presents a survey of the currently existing or proposed systems and solutions, based upon a subset of representative systems, and defines selection criteria allowing to classify these systems. These criteria are based on common questions such as, for example, is it video-on-demand or live streaming, is the architecture based on content delivery network, peer-to-peer or both, is the delivery overlay tree-based or mesh-based, is the system push-based or pull-based, single-stream or multi-streams, does it use data coding, and how do the clients choose their peers. Representative systems are briefly described to give a summarized overview of the proposed solutions, and four ones are analyzed in details. Finally, it is attempted to evaluate the most promising solutions for future experiments. Résumé La vidéo à la demande est un service où des films sont fournis à distance aux utilisateurs avec u

CliqueStream: an efficient and fault-resilient live streaming network on a clustered peer-to-peer overlay

Several overlay-based live multimedia streaming platforms have been proposed in the recent peer-to-peer streaming literature. In most of the cases, the overlay neighbors are chosen randomly for robustness of the overlay. However, this causes nodes that are distant in terms of proximity in the underlying physical network to become neighbors, and thus data travels unnecessary distances before reaching the destination. For efficiency of bulk data transmission like multimedia streaming, the overlay neighborhood should resemble the proximity in the underlying network. In this paper, we exploit the proximity and redundancy properties of a recently proposed clique-based clustered overlay network, named eQuus, to build efficient as well as robust overlays for multimedia stream dissemination. To combine the efficiency of content pushing over tree structured overlays and the robustness of data-driven mesh overlays, higher capacity stable nodes are organized in tree structure to carry the long haul traffic and less stable nodes with intermittent presence are organized in localized meshes. The overlay construction and fault-recovery procedures are explained in details. Simulation study demonstrates the good locality properties of the platform. The outage time and control overhead induced by the failure recovery mechanism are minimal as demonstrated by the analysis.Comment: 10 page

Video streaming over p2p using AQCS algorithm

P2p streaming has been popular and is expected to attract even more users. The proposed scheme can achieve high bandwidth utilization and optimal streaming rate possible in ap2p streaming system. The prototype implementing the queue based scheduling is developed and used to evaluate the scheme in real network. between one or more number of clients running un trusted code into controlled environment to a remote host that has opted into communication from that of the code p2p network which is use in case of The distribution of the videos. where proposed design which enables flexible customization of video streams to support heterogeneous of receivers, highly utilizes upload bandwidth of peers, and quickly adapts to network and peer dynamic

Adaptation and Robustness in Peer-to-Peer Streaming

The rapid development of network communication infrastructure enables networked multimedia streaming applications ranging from on-demand video streaming to highly interactive video conferencing. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies have emerged as a powerful and popular paradigm for bringing such emerging multimedia services to a large number of users. The essential advantage of P2P systems is that the system capacity scales up when more peers join, as peer upload capacity is utilized. However, providing satisfactory streaming services over P2P networks is challenging because of their inherent instability and unreliability and the limited adaptability of traditional video coding techniques. On one hand, different from dedicated servers, users may not have enough bandwidth to serve other users as most user connections are asymmetric in their upload and download capacity, and they are heterogeneous in terms of bandwidth and preferences. In addition, users can join and leave the system at any time as there are no guarantees on their contribution to the system. On the other hand, although traditional video coding techniques are efficient in terms of resource consumption, compression ratio, and coding and decoding speed, they do not support scalable modes efficiently as such modes come along with high computation cost. Consequently, in traditional P2P streaming systems, the bit rate (the video quality) of media streams is determined based on the capacities of the low-end users, i.e. the lowest common denominator, to make sure that most of their users can perceive acceptable quality. This causes two critical limitations of the current P2P streaming systems. First, users perceive the same quality regardless of their bandwidth capacity, i.e., no differentiated QoS. Second, with the current best-effort Internet and peer dynamics, the streaming quality at each peer is easily impaired, i.e., no continuous playback. Recently, multiple layer codec research has become more refined, as SVC (the scalable extension of the H.264/AVC standard) has been standardized with a bit rate overhead of around 10% and an indistinguishable visual quality compared to the state of the art single layer codec. The hypothesis of this research work is that the adaptable coding technique can bring significant benefits to P2P streaming as it enables adaptability in P2P streaming. In addition, to improve the robustness of the system to network fluctuations and peer dynamics, network coding and social networking are also applied. The overall goal of this research is to achieve adaptive and robust P2P streaming services, which are believed to be the next generation of P2P streaming on the Internet. Several major contributions are presented in this dissertation. First, to use SVC in P2P streaming, a segmentation method to segment SVC streams into scalable units is proposed such that they can be delivered adaptively by the P2P paradigm. The method is demonstrated to be able to preserve the scalability features of a stream, i.e., adaptation can be applied on segments and the re-generated stream at each peer is a valid stream. Second, a novel and complete adaptive P2P streaming protocol, named Chameleon, is presented. Chameleon uses the segmentation method to use SVC and combine it with network coding in P2P streaming to achieve high performance streaming. The core of Chameleon is studied, including neighbor selection, quality adaptation, receiver-driven peer coordination, and sender selection, with different design options. Experiments on Chameleon reveal that overlay construction is important to system performance, and traditional gossip-based protocols are not good enough for layered P2P streaming. Therefore, third, a SCAMP-based neighbor selection protocol and a peer sampling-based membership management protocol for layered P2P streaming are proposed. These gossip-based protocols are quality- and context-aware as they form robust and adaptable overlays for layered P2P streaming so that high capacity peers have a higher priority to be located at good positions in the overlay, e.g. closer to the server, and peers with similar capacity are connected to each other to better utilize resources. Fourth, to better deal with peer dynamics, Stir, a social-based P2P streaming system, is suggested. In Stir, the novel idea of spontaneous social networking is introduced. Stir users who join the same streaming session can make friends and communicate with each other by cheap yet efficient communication means, e.g., instant messaging and Twitter-like commenting. Such friendship networks are exploited directly by the underlying social-based P2P streaming protocol. The tight integration between the high level social networking of users and the low level overlay of peers is demonstrated to be beneficial in dealing with high churn rates and providing personalized streaming services. Finally, as the approaches are about different aspects of adaptive and robust P2P streaming, to complete the picture, Chameleon++, which combines Chameleon and Stir, is presented. The design and the evaluation of Chameleon++ demonstrate the feasibility and the benefits of the approaches, and the consistency of the study

Network coding for transport protocols

With the proliferation of smart devices that require Internet connectivity anytime, anywhere, and the recent technological advances that make it possible, current networked systems will have to provide a various range of services, such as content distribution, in a wide range of settings, including wireless environments. Wireless links may experience temporary losses, however, TCP, the de facto protocol for robust unicast communications, reacts by reducing the congestion window drastically and injecting less traffic in the network. Consequently the wireless links are underutilized and the overall performance of the TCP protocol in wireless environments is poor. As content delivery (i.e. multicasting) services, such as BBC iPlayer, become popular, the network needs to support the reliable transport of the data at high rates, and with specific delay constraints. A typical approach to deliver content in a scalable way is to rely on peer-to-peer technology (used by BitTorrent, Spotify and PPLive), where users share their resources, including bandwidth, storage space, and processing power. Still, these systems suffer from the lack of incentives for resource sharing and cooperation, and this problem is exacerbated in the presence of heterogenous users, where a tit-for-tat scheme is difficult to implement. Due to the issues highlighted above, current network architectures need to be changed in order to accommodate the users¿ demands for reliable and quality communications. In other words, the emergent need for advanced modes of information transport requires revisiting and improving network components at various levels of the network stack. The innovative paradigm of network coding has been shown as a promising technique to change the design of networked systems, by providing a shift from how data flows traditionally move through the network. This shift implies that data flows are no longer kept separate, according to the ¿store-and-forward¿ model, but they are also processed and mixed in the network. By appropriately combining data by means of network coding, it is expected to obtain significant benefits in several areas of network design and architecture. In this thesis, we set out to show the benefits of including network coding into three communication paradigms, namely point-topoint communications (e.g. unicast), point-to-multipoint communications (e.g. multicast), and multipoint-to-multipoint communications (e.g. peer-to-peer networks). For the first direction, we propose a network coding-based multipath scheme and show that TCP unicast sessions are feasible in highly volatile wireless environments. For point-to-multipoint communications, we give an algorithm to optimally achieve all the rate pairs from the rate region in the case of degraded multicast over the combination network. We also propose a system for live streaming that ensures reliability and quality of service to heterogenous users, even if data transmissions occur over lossy wireless links. Finally, for multipoint-to-multipoint communications, we design a system to provide incentives for live streaming in a peer-to-peer setting, where users have subscribed to different levels of quality. Our work shows that network coding enables a reliable transport of data, even in highly volatile environments, or in delay sensitive scenarios such as live streaming, and facilitates the implementation of an efficient incentive system, even in the presence of heterogenous users. Thus, network coding can solve the challenges faced by next generation networks in order to support advanced information transport.Postprint (published version

Multiple-Tree Push-based Overlay Streaming

Multiple-Tree Overlay Streaming has attracted a great amount of attention from researchers in the past years. Multiple-tree streaming is a promising alternative to single-tree streaming in terms of node dynamics and load balancing, among others, which in turn addresses the perceived video quality by the streaming user on node dynamics or when heterogeneous nodes join the network. This article presents a comprehensive survey of the different aproaches and techniques used in this research area. In this paper we identify node-disjointness as the property most approaches aim to achieve. We also present an alternative technique which does not try to achieve this but does local optimizations aiming global optimizations. Thus, we identify this property as not being absolute necessary for creating robust and heterogeneous multi-tree overlays. We identify two main design goals: robustness and support for heterogeneity, and classify existing approaches into these categories as their main focus

Network Architectures for Live Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) media streaming networks, motivated by the huge success of P2P file downloading networks, have recently attracted a lot of research interest. However, it is challenging to design P2P media streaming networks because of the stringent time constraints on the delivered media streams, which require more efficient and resilient overlay architectures. In this paper, we focus on live P2P media streaming networks, a promising application flourishing in the Internet and which requires the distribution of live (not stored) multimedia content to subscribers. We review the architectures for live P2P media streaming networks, and consider both overlay topologies and their construction