A Comprehensive Analysis of Swarming-based Live Streaming to Leverage Client Heterogeneity

Due to missing IP multicast support on an Internet scale, over-the-top media streams are delivered with the help of overlays as used by content delivery networks and their peer-to-peer (P2P) extensions. In this context, mesh/pull-based swarming plays an important role either as pure streaming approach or in combination with tree/push mechanisms. However, the impact of realistic client populations with heterogeneous resources is not yet fully understood. In this technical report, we contribute to closing this gap by mathematically analysing the most basic scheduling mechanisms latest deadline first (LDF) and earliest deadline first (EDF) in a continuous time Markov chain framework and combining them into a simple, yet powerful, mixed strategy to leverage inherent differences in client resources. The main contributions are twofold: (1) a mathematical framework for swarming on random graphs is proposed with a focus on LDF and EDF strategies in heterogeneous scenarios; (2) a mixed strategy, named SchedMix, is proposed that leverages peer heterogeneity. The proposed strategy, SchedMix is shown to outperform the other two strategies using different abstractions: a mean-field theoretic analysis of buffer probabilities, simulations of a stochastic model on random graphs, and a full-stack implementation of a P2P streaming system.Comment: Technical report and supplementary material to http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7497234

An Efficient Transport Protocol for delivery of Multimedia An Efficient Transport Protocol for delivery of Multimedia Content in Wireless Grids

A grid computing system is designed for solving complicated scientific and commercial problems effectively,whereas mobile computing is a traditional distributed system having computing capability with mobility and adopting wireless communications. Media and Entertainment fields can take advantage from both paradigms by applying its usage in gaming applications and multimedia data management. Multimedia data has to be stored and retrieved in an efficient and effective manner to put it in use. In this paper, we proposed an application layer protocol for delivery of multimedia data in wireless girds i.e. multimedia grid protocol (MMGP). To make streaming efficient a new video compression algorithm called dWave is designed and embedded in the proposed protocol. This protocol will provide faster, reliable access and render an imperceptible QoS in delivering multimedia in wireless grid environment and tackles the challenging issues such as i) intermittent connectivity, ii) device heterogeneity, iii) weak security and iv) device mobility.Comment: 20 pages, 15 figures, Peer Reviewed Journa

A framework for P2P application development

Although Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has become increasingly popular over recent years, there still exist only a very small number of application domains that have exploited it on a large scale. This can be attributed to a number of reasons including the rapid evolution of P2P technologies, coupled with their often-complex nature. This paper describes an implemented abstraction framework that seeks to aid developers in building P2P applications. A selection of example P2P applications that have been developed using this framework are also presented

On the Limit of Fountain MDC Codes for Video Peer-To-Peer Networks

Video streaming for heterogeneous types of devices, where nodes have different devices characteristics in terms of computational capacity and display, is usually handled by encoding the video with different qualities. This is not well suited for Peer-To-Peer (P2P) systems, as a single peer group can only share content of the same quality, thus limiting the peer group size and efficiency. To address this problem, several existing works propose the use of Multiple Descriptions Coding (MDC). The concept of this type of video codec is to split a video in a number of descriptions which can be used on their own, or aggregated to improve the global quality of the video. Unfortunately existing MDC codes are not flexible, as the video is split in a defined number of descriptions. In this paper, we focus on the practical feasibility of using a Fountain MDC code with properties similar to existing Fountain erasure codes, including the ability to create any number of descriptions when needed (on the fly). We perform simulations using selected pictures to assess the feasibility of using these codes, knowing that they should improve the availability of the video pieces in a P2P system and hence the video streaming quality. We observe that, although this idea seems promising, the evaluated benefits, demonstrated by the PSNR values, are limited when used in a real P2P video streaming system