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

Modeling and Evaluation of Multisource Streaming Strategies in P2P VoD Systems

In recent years, multimedia content distribution has largely been moved to the Internet, inducing broadcasters, operators and service providers to upgrade with large expenses their infrastructures. In this context, streaming solutions that rely on user devices such as set-top boxes (STBs) to offload dedicated streaming servers are particularly appropriate. In these systems, contents are usually replicated and scattered over the network established by STBs placed at users' home, and the video-on-demand (VoD) service is provisioned through streaming sessions established among neighboring STBs following a Peer-to-Peer fashion. Up to now the majority of research works have focused on the design and optimization of content replicas mechanisms to minimize server costs. The optimization of replicas mechanisms has been typically performed either considering very crude system performance indicators or analyzing asymptotic behavior. In this work, instead, we propose an analytical model that complements previous works providing fairly accurate predictions of system performance (i.e., blocking probability). Our model turns out to be a highly scalable, flexible, and extensible tool that may be helpful both for designers and developers to efficiently predict the effect of system design choices in large scale STB-VoD system

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Network coding meets multimedia: a review

While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and mediaspecific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networkin

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

Robust P2P Live Streaming

Projecte fet en col.laboració amb la Fundació i2CATThe provisioning of robust real-time communication services (voice, video, etc.) or media contents through the Internet in a distributed manner is an important challenge, which will strongly influence in current and future Internet evolution. Aware of this, we are developing a project named Trilogy leaded by the i2CAT Foundation, which has as main pillar the study, development and evaluation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Live streaming architectures for the distribution of high-quality media contents. In this context, this work concretely covers media coding aspects and proposes the use of Multiple Description Coding (MDC) as a flexible solution for providing robust and scalable live streaming over P2P networks. This work describes current state of the art in media coding techniques and P2P streaming architectures, presents the implemented prototype as well as its simulation and validation results