Flexible macroblock ordering for video over P2P

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a promising technology for video streaming, and offers advantages in terms of re-configurability and scalability. It gains advantage from and share the resources owned by the end-users who are distributed around the Internet. P2P has shown an alternative solution for the traditional Client-Server approach limitations. However, due to the churn of peers, issues of video quality arise such as packet loss. This in turn degrades the QoS, then the QoE. Moreover, in current networking conditions, congestions and bottlenecks cannot be circumvented easily due to the increase in Internet traffic. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel combination of two well known techniques known as "locality awareness" and "Flexible Macroblock Ordering" (FMO). Locality-awareness plays a vital role in reducing the transmission cost among the peers whilst FMO is shown to be superior to other error resilience techniques in case of packet loss. However these two approaches have not been studied in conjunction. A comparative simulation-based study has been carried out for the proposed approach against a benchmark system, i.e., without introducing any error resilience technique. The results have shown better performance of the proposed approach in terms of End-to-End delay and video quality, as measured by PSNR