A Review on P2P Video Streaming
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paper_title: Streaming Video over the Internet : Approaches and Directions

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Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and increasing demand for multimedia information on the Web, streaming video over the Internet has received tremendous attention from academia and industry. Transmission of real-time video typically has bandwidth, delay, and loss requirements. However, the current best-effort Internet does not offer any quality of service (QoS) guarantees to streaming video. Furthermore, for video multicast, it is difficult to achieve both efficiency and flexibility. Thus, Internet streaming video poses many challenges. In this article we cover six key areas of streaming video. Specifically, we cover video compression, application-layer QoS control, continuous media distribution services, streaming servers, media synchronization mechanisms, and protocols for streaming media. For each area, we address the particular issues and review major approaches and mechanisms. We also discuss the tradeoffs of the approaches and point out future research directions.
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paper_title: CDN: Content Distribution Network

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Internet evolves and operates largely without a central coordination, the lack of which was and is critically important to the rapid growth and evolution of Internet. However, the lack of management in turn makes it very difficult to guarantee proper performance and to deal systematically with performance problems. Meanwhile, the available network bandwidth and server capacity continue to be overwhelmed by the skyrocketing Internet utilization and the accelerating growth of bandwidth intensive content. As a result, Internet service quality perceived by customers is largely unpredictable and unsatisfactory. Content Distribution Network (CDN) is an effective approach to improve Internet service quality. CDN replicates the content from the place of origin to the replica servers scattered over the Internet and serves a request from a replica server close to where the request originates. In this paper, we first give an overview about CDN. We then present the critical issues involved in designing and implementing an effective CDN and survey the approaches proposed in literature to address these problems. An example of CDN is described to show how a real commercial CDN operates. After this, we present a scheme that provides fast service location for peer-to-peer systems, a special type of CDN with no infrastructure support. We conclude with a brief projection about CDN.
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paper_title: Designing Web Audio

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From the Publisher: ::: Designing Web Audio is the most complete Internet audio guide on the market. It's loaded with informative real-world case studies and interviews with some of the world's leading audio and web producers. It contains step-by-step intstructions on how to build multimedia web pages using the most popular web audio formats. This book also includes a wealth of basic digital audio and sound wave theory, practical tips and techniques for recording and editing audio for the Web, and an invaluable buyer's guide to building an effective sound studio. ::: Designing Web Audio explains how digital audio is encoded from microphone to hard disk; how sound is processed using compression and equalization; and how to turn audio source material into a great soundtrack using loops and ambient soundscapes. Designing Web Audio demystifies its subject with informative step-by-step techniques for encoding, compression, and streaming audio over the Web. ::: This book includes the following: ::: The most up-to-date, step-by-step guides to the latest popular streaming media formats for building multimedia web pages including RealAudio, Shockwave, Flash, MP3, MIDI, and RMF (Beatnik). A step-by-step guide to building multimedia Synchronized Media Integration Language (SMIL) presentations using the new RealSystem G2. (This is the only book on the market that offers information on this.) In-depth coverage of the sound design principles for building effective multimedia web pages with sound, including examples of real-world sound design techniques used by leading film and CD-ROM sound designers. Informative case studies featuring leading companies such as N2K, Fox News Corp,TechWeb, and Sonicopia, and how they are enhancing their web pages using Flash, RealAudio, Shockwave, or Beatnik's audio technologies. Tips from two Academy Award-winning sound designers that will help web professionals use audio more intelligently. In-depth consumer buyer's guide with street prices and tips for buying the best gear at the lowest prices to produce high-quality Internet audio in-house. Thorough practical coverage of digital audio theory and basic recording and editing techniques. ::: ::: The easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions on using the leading audio formats will make Designing Web Audio an invaluable resource for Web developers and individuals who want to stream their own music over the Web.
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paper_title: Streaming Video over the Internet : Approaches and Directions

paper_content:

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and increasing demand for multimedia information on the Web, streaming video over the Internet has received tremendous attention from academia and industry. Transmission of real-time video typically has bandwidth, delay, and loss requirements. However, the current best-effort Internet does not offer any quality of service (QoS) guarantees to streaming video. Furthermore, for video multicast, it is difficult to achieve both efficiency and flexibility. Thus, Internet streaming video poses many challenges. In this article we cover six key areas of streaming video. Specifically, we cover video compression, application-layer QoS control, continuous media distribution services, streaming servers, media synchronization mechanisms, and protocols for streaming media. For each area, we address the particular issues and review major approaches and mechanisms. We also discuss the tradeoffs of the approaches and point out future research directions.
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paper_title: Exploring content delivery networking

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One of the hot topics in the networking industry is content delivery networking. Unfortunately, if you ask five people for a definition of a content delivery network (CDN), you will probably get five different answers. We hope to clear up some of the confusion surrounding CDNs, discuss how typical enterprise and service provider networks are likely to use them, and describe the business drivers that will fuel their growth in the coming years.
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paper_title: Metropolitan area video-on-demand service using pyramid broadcasting

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Pyramid broadcasting is a new way of giving video-on-demand service on a metropolitan scale. We multiplex the most frequently requested movies on the network, gaining a radical improvement in access time and bandwidth use. This is achieved by using storage at the receiving end. As the available bandwidth increases, the improvement in access time is exponential instead of linear as in conventional broadcasting. The larger the bandwidth of the network is, the better gain in the access time due to pyramid broadcasting. As the access-time requirement decreases, the bandwidth in conventional broadcasting increases linearly, while the bandwidth in pyramid broadcasting increases only logarithmically. We provide analytical and experimental evaluations of pyramid broadcasting based on its implementation on an Ethernet LAN.
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paper_title: Video on-demand streaming on the Internet — A survey

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Video-on-demand (VoD) streaming applications have evolved into one of the most popular types of applications on the Internet over the past decade. A great amount of research has been conducted to address the high bandwidth and stringent delay requirements of VoD applications on the video servers and the Internet. In this paper, we provide a broad survey of existing schemes and classify them into four categories. We also discuss the trade-offs and examine representative schemes in each category. Finally, we highlight future directions.
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paper_title: On optimal batching policies for video-on-demand storage servers

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In a video-on-demand environment, batching of video requests is often used to reduce I/O demand and improve throughput. Since viewers may defect if they experience long waits, a good video scheduling policy needs to consider not only the batch size but also the viewer defection probabilities and wait times. Two conventional scheduling policies for batching are first-come-first-served (FCFS) and maximum queue length (MOL). Neither of these policies lead to entirely satisfactory results. MQL tends to be too aggressive in scheduling popular videos by only considering the queue length to maximize batch size, while FCFS has the opposite effect. We introduce the notion of factored queue length and propose a batching policy that schedules the video with the maximum factored queue length. We refer to this as the MFQ policy. The factored queue length is obtained by weighting each video queue length with a factor which is biased against the more popular videos. An optimization problem is formulated to solve the best weighting factors for the various videos. A simulation is developed to compare the proposed MFQ policy with FCFS and MQL. Our study shows that MFQ yields excellent empirical results in terms of standard performance measures such as average latency time, defection rates and fairness.
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paper_title: Bandwidth skimming: a technique for cost-effective video on demand

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Video-on-demand applications must consider the bandwidth limitations at the server, within the network, and at the client. Recent multicast delivery techniques have addressed the server and network bandwidth bottlenecks. These techniques, however, neglect consideration of client network access bandwidth limitations. Client bandwidth is often insufficient to permit streaming video of the quality that clients would desire, yet these new multicast delivery techniques require clients to be capable of receiving two or more transmission streams simultaneously, each at the playback bit rate. The reduction in the playback bit rate required to use these techniques implies substantially poorer display quality. This paper proposes a new technique for on-demand delivery of streaming media that addresses this problem. The idea is to hold in reserve, or “skim”, a portion of the client reception bandwidth that is sufficiently small that display quality is not impacted significantly, and yet that is nonetheless enough to support substantial reductions in server and network bandwidth through near-optimal hierarchical client stream merging. In this paper we show that this objective is feasible, and we develop practical techniques that achieve it. The results indicate that server and network bandwidth can be reduced to on the order of the logarithm of the number of clients who are viewing the object, using a small “skim” (e.g., 15%) of client reception bandwidth. These low server and network bandwidths are achieved for every media file, while providing immediate service to each client, and without having to pre-load initial portions of the video at each client.
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paper_title: Video-on-demand broadcasting protocols: a comprehensive study

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Broadcasting protocols are proved to be efficient for transmitting most of the popular videos in video-on-demand systems. We propose a generalized analytical approach to evaluate the efficiency of the broadcasting protocols and derive the theoretical lower bandwidth requirement bound for any periodic broadcasting protocols. By means of the proposed analytical tool-temporal-bandwidth map, the approach can be used to direct the design of periodic broadcasting protocols to achieve different goals, e.g., server bandwidth requirement, client waiting time, client I/O bandwidth requirement etc. As the most important performance index in a VOD system is the required server bandwidth, we give the solution to achieve the optimal bandwidth efficiency given client waiting time requirement and the length of the video. To take into account the popular compressed video with variable bit rate, the optimal approach is applied readily to the VBR videos and can achieve zero loss and best bandwidth efficiency. We give a proof why existing techniques such as smoothing and prefetching is not necessary and in some cases inefficient in broadcasting protocols. We also discuss how broadcasting schemes can be tailored to support true and interactive VOD service. An insightful comparison between broadcasting and multicasting schemes is also given.
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paper_title: A simple low-bandwidth broadcasting protocol for video-on-demand

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Broadcasting protocols can reduce the cost of video-on-demand services by using much less bandwidth to transmit videos that are simultaneously watched by many viewers. Unfortunately, the most efficient broadcasting protocols are also the most difficult to implement because they allocate a multitude of very low bandwidth streams to each video. We present a protocol that uses between three and seven high-bandwidth streams per video and never requires more than five percent more bandwidth than any other protocol to guarantee a given average waiting time.
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paper_title: Skyscraper broadcasting: a new broadcasting scheme for metropolitan video-on-demand systems

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We investigate a novel multicast technique, called Skyscraper Broadcasting (SB), for video-on-demand applications. We discuss the data fragmentation technique, the broadcasting strategy, and the client design. We also show the correctness of our technique, and derive mathematical equations to analyze its storage requirement. To assess its performance, we compare it to the latest designs known as Pyramid Broadcasting (PB) and Permutation-Based Pyramid Broadcasting (PPB). Our study indicates that PB offers excellent access latency. However, it requires very large storage space and disk bandwidth at the receiving end. PPB is able to address these problems. However, this is accomplished at the expense of a larger access latency and more complex synchronization. With SB, we are able to achieve the low latency of PB while using only 20% of the buffer space required by PPB.
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paper_title: Hybrid broadcasting protocol for video on demand

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Broadcasting protocols can improve the efficiency of video on demand services by reducing the bandwidth required to transmit videos that are simultaneously watched by many viewers. It has been recently shown that broadcasting protocols using a very large number of very low bandwidth streams for each video required less total bandwidth than protocols using a few high-bandwidth streams shared by all videos. We present a hybrid broadcasting protocol that combines the advantages of these two classes of protocols. Our pagoda broadcasting protocol uses only a small number of high-bandwidth streams and requires only slightly more bandwidth than the best extant protocols to achieve a given maximum waiting time.
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paper_title: Can internet video-on-demand be profitable?

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Video-on-demand in the Internet has become an immensely popular service in recent years. But due to its high bandwidth requirements and popularity, it is also a costly service to provide. We consider the design and potential benefits of peer-assisted video-on-demand, in which participating peers assist the server in delivering VoD content. The assistance is done in such a way that it provides the same user quality experience as pure client-server distribution. We focus on the single-video approach, whereby a peer only redistributes a video that it is currently watching. ::: Using a nine-month trace from a client-server VoD deployment for MSN Video, we assess what the 95 percentile server bandwidth costs would have been if a peer-assisted employment had been instead used. We show that peer-assistance can dramatically reduce server bandwidth costs, particularly if peers prefetch content when there is spare upload capacity in the system. We consider the impact of peer-assisted VoD on the cross-traffic among ISPs. Although this traffic is significant, if care is taken to localize the P2P traffic within the ISPs, we can eliminate the ISP cross traffic while still achieving important reductions in server bandwidth. We also develop a simple analytical model which captures many of the critical features of peer-assisted VoD, including its operational modes.
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paper_title: Techniques for improving the capacity of video-on-demand systems

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We present two techniques to improve the capacity of video on demand systems. Video on demand is an electronic video rental system in which clients request and play videos on-demand. Video on demand system can be implemented over an existing cable TV network or an upgraded ADSL network. The two techniques used to improve the capacity of video on-demand systems are segmentation and multicasting. Segmentation consists of dividing the video into several fixed length segments, and then transmitting the segments at regular intervals instead of transmitting the entire video continuously. Multicasting assumes that each subscriber has a limited storage space, so the same video segments can be multicast to subscribers simultaneously. Results of a comprehensive simulation study presented in the paper show a significant improvement in the capacity of the system when these two techniques are applied. In evaluating video on demand systems we considered the following parameters: the number of users supported, the number of videos played per day, and the number of requests rejected per day.
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paper_title: When is P2P technology beneficial for IPTV services

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This paper studies the conditions under which peer-to-peer (P2P) technology may be beneficial in providing IPTV services over typical network architectures. It has two major contributions. First, we contrast two network models used to study the performance of such a system: a commonly used logical “Internet as a cloud” model and a “physical” model that reflects the characteristics of the underlying network. Specifically, we show that the cloud model overlooks important architectural aspects of the network and may drastically overstate the benefits of P2P technology by a factor of 3 or more. Second, we provide a cost-benefit analysis of P2P video content delivery focusing on the profit trade-offs for different pricing/incentive models rather than purely on capacity maximization. In particular, we find that under high volume of video demand, a P2P built-in incentive model performs better than any other model for both high-definition and standard-definition media, while the usage-based model generally generates more profits when the request rate is low. The flat-reward model generally falls in-between the usagebased model and the built-in model in terms of prof itability.
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paper_title: Applications and Development Prospects of IPTV

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IPTV technology can be used to configure a variety of multimedia services functions based on choices of the user and has been rapid development in China, South Korea and the United States. In order to popularize and promote IPTV comprehensively, it must be implemented that all the interfaces are open and industry informationization.
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paper_title: Internet Protocol Television (IPTV): The Killer Application for the Next-Generation Internet

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Internet protocol television (IPTV) will be the killer application for the next-generation Internet and will provide exciting new revenue opportunities for service providers. However, to deploy IPTV services with a full quality of service (QoS) guarantee, many underlying technologies must be further studied. This article serves as a survey of IPTV services and the underlying technologies. Technical challenges also are identified.
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paper_title: New insights on internet streaming and IPTV

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The Internet witnessed its traffic evolved from text and images based traditional Web content to more multimedia rich applications in the past decade. As a result, multimedia and Internet streaming technology have become an increasingly important building block to many Internet applications, ranging from remote education, digital radio, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), etc. This paper discusses the fundamental issues in Internet streaming delivery and associated technical challenges. It emphasizes the architecture and system differences between streaming applications and traditional Web applications. It reviews our research experience and presents lessons learned in this area as well as points out directions for future work.
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paper_title: Wireless Mesh Networks for In-Home IPTV Distribution

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IPTV is considered to be the next killer application. A key, challenging issue is in-home IPTV distribution with affordable deployment cost and sufficient flexibility, scalability, and reliability. In this article, we first survey and compare the emerging wired and wireless communication technologies for broadband home networks, including transmission over power lines, phone lines, coaxial cables or Ethernet cables, and IEEE 802.1 In, ultra wideband and millimeter wave wireless technologies. Considering these promising candidates for future broadband home networks, we propose three wireless mesh network architectures. These enable consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime IPTV services without rewiring their homes. We compare the cost, reliability, and scalability of the three architectures. We further study their admission regions for IPTV, that is, the number of IPTV connections that can be supported simultaneously with satisfactory QoS. Analytical and simulation results with H.264 HDTV sources over wired, single hop wireless, and multi-hop wireless paths are given. These results can provide important guidelines for future broadband home network design supporting IPTV services.
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paper_title: Enabling resilient P2P video streaming: survey and analysis

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Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques for multimedia streaming have been shown to be a good enhancement to the traditional client/server methods when trying to reduce costs and increase robustness. Due to the fact that P2P systems are highly dynamic, the main challenge that has to be addressed remains supporting the general resilience of the system. Various challenges arise when building a resilient P2P streaming system, such as network failures and system dynamics. In this paper, we first classify the different challenges that face P2P streaming and then present and analyze the possible countermeasures. We classify resilience mechanisms as either core mechanisms, which are part of the system, or as cross-layer mechanisms that use information from different communication layers, which might inflict additional costs. We analyze and present resilience mechanisms from an engineering point of view, such that a system engineer can use our analysis as a guide to build a resilient P2P streaming system with different mechanisms and for various application scenarios.
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paper_title: A scalable content-addressable network

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Hash tables - which map "keys" onto "values" - are an essential building block in modern software systems. We believe a similar functionality would be equally valuable to large distributed systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Content-Addressable Network (CAN) as a distributed infrastructure that provides hash table-like functionality on Internet-like scales. The CAN is scalable, fault-tolerant and completely self-organizing, and we demonstrate its scalability, robustness and low-latency properties through simulation.
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paper_title: An Overview on Peer-to-Peer Information Systems

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The limitations of client/server systems become evident in an Internetscale distributed environment. P2P systems offer an alternative to traditional client/server systems: Every node acts both as a client and a server and “pays” its participation by providing access to its computing resources. Systems such as Napster and Gnutella have proven their practical applicability. In this article we briefly introduce the key concepts and properties of the P2P paradigm and overview commercial systems and research approaches.
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paper_title: A mobile system of super-peers using city buses

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Recently, researchers have introduced the notion of super-peers to improve signaling efficiency as well as lookup performance of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. In a separate development, recent works on applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have seen several proposals, e.g. in the paper by Wong (2003) and Jetcheva et al. (2003), on utilizing mobile fleets such as city buses to deploy a mobile backbone infrastructure for communication and Internet access in a metropolitan environment. This paper further explores the possibility of deploying P2P applications such as content sharing and distributed computing, over this mobile backbone infrastructure. Specifically, we study how city buses may be deployed as a mobile system of super-peers. We discuss the main motivations behind our proposal, and outline in detail the design of a super-peer based structured P2P system using a fleet of city buses.
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paper_title: Constructing a balanced, (log(N)/1oglog(N))-diameter super-peer topology for scalable P2P systems

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Current peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing applications are remarkably simple and robust, but their inefficiency can produce very high network loads. The use of super-peers has been proposed to improve the performance of unstructured P2P systems. These have the potential to approach the performance and scalability of structured systems, while retaining the benefits of unstructured P2P systems. There has, however, been little consensus on the best topology for connecting these super-peers, or how to construct the topology in a distributed, robust way. In this paper we propose a scalable unstructured P2P system (SUPS). The unique aspect of SUPS is a protocol for the distributed construction of a super-peer topology that has highly desirable performance characteristics. The protocol is inspired by the theory of random graphs. We describe the protocol, and demonstrate experimentally that it produces a balanced and low-diameter super-peer topology at low cost. We show that the method is very robust to super-peer failures and inconsistent information, and compare it with other approaches.
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paper_title: Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications

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A fundamental problem that confronts peer-to-peer applications is to efficiently locate the node that stores a particular data item. This paper presents Chord, a distributed lookup protocol that addresses this problem. Chord provides support for just one operation: given a key, it maps the key onto a node. Data location can be easily implemented on top of Chord by associating a key with each data item, and storing the key/data item pair at the node to which the key maps. Chord adapts efficiently as nodes join and leave the system, and can answer queries even if the system is continuously changing. Results from theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments show that Chord is scalable, with communication cost and the state maintained by each node scaling logarithmically with the number of Chord nodes.
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paper_title: A Two-layer Super-Peer based P2P Live Media Streaming System

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Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing has become increasingly popular, accounting for as much as 70% of Internet traffic by some estimates. Recently, we have been witnessing the emergence of a new class of popular P2P applications, namely, P2P audio and video streaming. While traditional P2P file distribution applications target elastic data transfers, P2P streaming focuses on the efficient delivery of audio and video content under tight timing requirements. In these applications, each node independently selects some other nodes as its neighbors and exchanges streaming data with neighbors. In this paper, we propose and investigate a full distributed, scalable, and cooperative protocol for live video streaming in an overlay peer-to-peer network. Our protocol, termed P2P Super-Peer based Unstructured Live Media Streaming (PALMS-SP), makes use of combination of push-pull scheduling methods to achieve high performance (in term of delay, stream continuity, cooperation, etc.). The main contribution of PALMS-SP is that it reduces the endto-end streaming delay and in turn results better delivered quality. Furthermore, with the implementation of two-layer based overlay network that consists of super-peers and ordinary peers, PALMS-SP is able to leverage on the heterogeneity of bandwidths and simplify the complexity of transmission service and in turn shows better Quality of Service (QoS). We have extensively evaluated the performance of PALMS-SP. Our experiments demonstrate that PALMS-SP achieves good streaming quality with the existence of super-peers.
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paper_title: Traffic analysis of peer-to-peer IPTV communities

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The Internet is currently experiencing one of the most important challenges in terms of content distribution since its first uses as a medium for content delivery: users from passive downloaders and browsers are moving towards content producers and publishers. They often distribute and retrieve multimedia contents establishing network communities. This is the case of peer-to-peer IPTV communities. In this work we present a detailed study of P2P IPTV traffic, providing useful insights on both transport- and packet-level properties as well as on the behavior of the peers inside the network. In particular, we provide novel results on the (i) ports and protocols used; (ii) differences between signaling and video traffic; (iii) behavior of the traffic at different time scales; (iv) differences between TCP and UDP traffic; (v) traffic generated and received by peers; (vi) peers neighborhood and session duration. The knowledge gained thanks to this analysis is useful for several tasks, e.g. traffic identification, understanding the performance of different P2P IPTV technologies and the impact of such traffic on network nodes and links, and building more realistic models for simulations.
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paper_title: Opportunities and Challenges of Peer-to-Peer Internet Video Broadcast

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There have been tremendous efforts and many technical innovations in supporting real-time video streaming in the past two decades, but cost-effective large-scale video broadcast has remained an elusive goal. Internet protocol (IP) multicast represented an earlier attempt to tackle this problem but failed largely due to concerns regarding scalability, deployment, and support for higher level functionality. Recently, peer-to-peer based broadcast has emerged as a promising technique, which has been shown to be cost effective and easy to deploy. This new paradigm brings a number of unique advantages such as scalability, resilience, and effectiveness in coping with dynamics and heterogeneity. While peer-to-peer applications such as file download and voice-over-IP have gained tremendous popularity, video broadcast is still in its early stages, and its full potential remains to be seen. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of peer-to-peer Internet video broadcast technologies. We describe the basic taxonomy of peer-to-peer broadcast and summarize the major issues associated with the design of broadcast overlays. We closely examine two approaches - tree-based and data-driven - and discuss their fundamental tradeoff and potential for large-scale deployment. Lastly, we outline the key challenges and open problems and highlight possible avenues for future directions.
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paper_title: A peer-to-peer architecture for media streaming

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Given that the Internet does not widely support Internet protocol multicast while content-distribution-network technologies are costly, the concept of peer-to-peer could be a promising start for enabling large-scale streaming systems. In our so-called Zigzag approach, we propose a method for clustering peers into a hierarchy called the administrative organization for easy management, and a method for building the multicast tree atop this hierarchy for efficient content transmission. In Zigzag, the multicast tree has a height logarithmic with the number of clients, and a node degree bounded by a constant. This helps reduce the number of processing hops on the delivery path to a client while avoiding network bottlenecks. Consequently, the end-to-end delay is kept small. Although one could build a tree satisfying such properties easily, an efficient control protocol between the nodes must be in place to maintain the tree under the effects of network dynamics. Zigzag handles such situations gracefully, requiring a constant amortized worst-case control overhead. Especially, failure recovery is done regionally with impact on, at most, a constant number of existing clients and with mostly no burden on the server.
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paper_title: Enabling resilient P2P video streaming: survey and analysis

paper_content:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques for multimedia streaming have been shown to be a good enhancement to the traditional client/server methods when trying to reduce costs and increase robustness. Due to the fact that P2P systems are highly dynamic, the main challenge that has to be addressed remains supporting the general resilience of the system. Various challenges arise when building a resilient P2P streaming system, such as network failures and system dynamics. In this paper, we first classify the different challenges that face P2P streaming and then present and analyze the possible countermeasures. We classify resilience mechanisms as either core mechanisms, which are part of the system, or as cross-layer mechanisms that use information from different communication layers, which might inflict additional costs. We analyze and present resilience mechanisms from an engineering point of view, such that a system engineer can use our analysis as a guide to build a resilient P2P streaming system with different mechanisms and for various application scenarios.
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paper_title: Understanding mesh-based peer-to-peer streaming

paper_content:

A common approach to peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming is to form a tree-based overlay coupled with push content delivery. This approach cannot effectively utilize the outgoing bandwidth of participating peers, and therefore it is not self-scaling. In contrast, swarm-like content delivery mechanisms exhibit the self-scaling property but incorporating them into live P2P streaming applications are challenging for two reasons: (i) in-time requirement of content delivery and (ii) the limited availability of future content. In this paper, we examine the key design issues and tradeoffs in incorporating swarm-like content delivery into mesh-based P2P streaming of live content. We show how overlay properties and the global pattern of content delivery could lead to the bandwidth and content bottlenecks among peers, respectively. Leveraging an organized view of the overlay, we present a global pattern for streaming content over a mesh-based overlay that can effectively utilize the outgoing bandwidth of most participating peers. We conduct ns simulation to explore the impact of overlay properties on the global pattern of content delivery and thus delivered quality to individual peers. In particular, we show that for a given scenario, there is a sweet range for peer degree in the overlay that maximizes delivered quality to individual peers with minimum buffer requirement at each peer.
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paper_title: Enabling conferencing applications on the internet using an overlay muilticast architecture

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In response to the serious scalability and deployment concerns with IP Multicast, we and other researchers have advocated an alternate architecture for supporting group communication applications over the Internet where all multicast functionality is pushed to the edge. We refer to such an architecture as End System Multicast. While End System Multicast has several potential advantages, a key concern is the performance penalty associated with such a design. While preliminary simulation results conducted in static environments are promising, they have yet to consider the challenging performance requirements of real world applications in a dynamic and heterogeneous Internet environment.In this paper, we explore how Internet environments and application requirements can influence End System Multicast design. We explore these issues in the context of audio and video conferencing: an important class of applications with stringent performance requirements. We conduct an extensive evaluation study of schemes for constructing overlay networks on a wide-area test-bed of about twenty hosts distributed around the Internet. Our results demonstrate that it is important to adapt to both latency and bandwidth while constructing overlays optimized for conferencing applications. Further, when relatively simple techniques are incorporated into current self-organizing protocols to enable dynamic adaptation to latency and bandwidth, the performance benefits are significant. Our results indicate that End System Multicast is a promising architecture for enabling performance-demanding conferencing applications in a dynamic and heterogeneous Internet environment.
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paper_title: Intelligent multimedia communication : techniques and applications

paper_content:

Rate Control and Error Resilience for Object-based Video Coding .- Representation and Coding Formats for Stereo and Multiview Video.- Present and Future Video Coding Standards.- AVS Video Coding Standard.- A Resolution Adaptive Video Compression System.- Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems.- Topology Construction and Resource Allocation in P2P Live Streaming.- Intelligent Video Network Engineering with Distributed Optimization: Two Case Studies.- Media coding for streaming in networks with source and path diversity.- Peer-assisted Media Streaming: a Holistic Review.- Free-Viewpoint TV (FTV) .- UGC Video Sharing: Measurement and Analysis.- Terrestrial Television Broadcasting in China: Technologies and Applications.- Network Topology Inference for Multimedia Streaming.- Resolution-Improvement Scheme for Wireless Video Transmission.
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paper_title: ZIGZAG: an efficient peer-to-peer scheme for media streaming

paper_content:

A peer-to-peer technique called ZIGZAG for single-source media streaming is designed . ZIGZAG allows the media server to distribute content to many clients by organizing them into an appropriate tree rooted at the server. This application-layer multicast tree has a height logarithmic with the number of clients and a node degree bounded by a constant. This helps reduce the number of processing hops on the delivery path to a client while avoiding network bottleneck. Consequently, the end-to-end delay is kept small. Although one could build a tree satisfying such properties easily, an efficient control protocol between the nodes must be in place to maintain the tree under the effects of network dynamics and unpredictable client behaviors. ZIGZAG handles such situations gracefully requiring a constant amortized control overhead. Especially, failure recovery can be done regionally with little impact on the existing clients and mostly no burden on the server.
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paper_title: Mesh or Multiple-Tree: A Comparative Study of Live P2P Streaming Approaches

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Existing approaches to P2P streaming can be divided into two general classes: (i) tree-based approaches use push-based content delivery over multiple tree-shaped overlays, and (ii) mesh-based approaches use swarming content delivery over a randomly connected mesh. Previous studies have often focused on a particular P2P streaming mechanism and no comparison between these two classes has been conducted. In this paper, we compare and contrast the performance of representative protocols from each class using simulations. We identify the similarities and differences between these two approaches. Furthermore, we separately examine the behavior of content delivery and overlay construction mechanisms for both approaches in static and dynamic scenarios. Our results indicate that the mesh-based approach consistently exhibits a superior performance over the tree-based approach. We also show that the main factors attributing in the inferior performance of the tree-based approach are (i) the static mapping of content to a particular tree, and (ii) the placement of each peer as an internal node in one tree and as a leaf in all other trees.
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paper_title: Opportunities and Challenges of Peer-to-Peer Internet Video Broadcast

paper_content:

There have been tremendous efforts and many technical innovations in supporting real-time video streaming in the past two decades, but cost-effective large-scale video broadcast has remained an elusive goal. Internet protocol (IP) multicast represented an earlier attempt to tackle this problem but failed largely due to concerns regarding scalability, deployment, and support for higher level functionality. Recently, peer-to-peer based broadcast has emerged as a promising technique, which has been shown to be cost effective and easy to deploy. This new paradigm brings a number of unique advantages such as scalability, resilience, and effectiveness in coping with dynamics and heterogeneity. While peer-to-peer applications such as file download and voice-over-IP have gained tremendous popularity, video broadcast is still in its early stages, and its full potential remains to be seen. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of peer-to-peer Internet video broadcast technologies. We describe the basic taxonomy of peer-to-peer broadcast and summarize the major issues associated with the design of broadcast overlays. We closely examine two approaches - tree-based and data-driven - and discuss their fundamental tradeoff and potential for large-scale deployment. Lastly, we outline the key challenges and open problems and highlight possible avenues for future directions.
---
paper_title: Intelligent multimedia communication : techniques and applications

paper_content:

Rate Control and Error Resilience for Object-based Video Coding .- Representation and Coding Formats for Stereo and Multiview Video.- Present and Future Video Coding Standards.- AVS Video Coding Standard.- A Resolution Adaptive Video Compression System.- Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems.- Topology Construction and Resource Allocation in P2P Live Streaming.- Intelligent Video Network Engineering with Distributed Optimization: Two Case Studies.- Media coding for streaming in networks with source and path diversity.- Peer-assisted Media Streaming: a Holistic Review.- Free-Viewpoint TV (FTV) .- UGC Video Sharing: Measurement and Analysis.- Terrestrial Television Broadcasting in China: Technologies and Applications.- Network Topology Inference for Multimedia Streaming.- Resolution-Improvement Scheme for Wireless Video Transmission.
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paper_title: Scalable application layer multicast

paper_content:

We describe a new scalable application-layer multicast protocol, specifically designed for low-bandwidth, data streaming applications with large receiver sets. Our scheme is based upon a hierarchical clustering of the application-layer multicast peers and can support a number of different data delivery trees with desirable properties.We present extensive simulations of both our protocol and the Narada application-layer multicast protocol over Internet-like topologies. Our results show that for groups of size 32 or more, our protocol has lower link stress (by about 25%), improved or similar end-to-end latencies and similar failure recovery properties. More importantly, it is able to achieve these results by using orders of magnitude lower control traffic.Finally, we present results from our wide-area testbed in which we experimented with 32-100 member groups distributed over 8 different sites. In our experiments, average group members established and maintained low-latency paths and incurred a maximum packet loss rate of less than 1% as members randomly joined and left the multicast group. The average control overhead during our experiments was less than 1 Kbps for groups of size 100.
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paper_title: The Common Problems on the Peer-to-Peer Multicast Overlay Networks

paper_content:

Peer-to-peer overlay, a more promising topology construction, promotes the development of Application Layer Multicast. There have been many studies on the overlay construction and improve the multicast performance. Most of these studies focused on the building period of overlay network or multicast tree. After the overlay construction is established, it will remains stable unless churn of overlay (peers leaving and joining). It is not flexible in the heterogeneous and variable Internet environment. In this paper we analyzed three overlay constructions of the P2P-based ALM from single-tree, multi-tree to mesh, some key problems affecting the multicast performance are considered including the tradeoff between depth and out-degree, the available ratio of leaf nodes, and the influence on the churn of overlay.
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paper_title: ZIGZAG: an efficient peer-to-peer scheme for media streaming

paper_content:

A peer-to-peer technique called ZIGZAG for single-source media streaming is designed . ZIGZAG allows the media server to distribute content to many clients by organizing them into an appropriate tree rooted at the server. This application-layer multicast tree has a height logarithmic with the number of clients and a node degree bounded by a constant. This helps reduce the number of processing hops on the delivery path to a client while avoiding network bottleneck. Consequently, the end-to-end delay is kept small. Although one could build a tree satisfying such properties easily, an efficient control protocol between the nodes must be in place to maintain the tree under the effects of network dynamics and unpredictable client behaviors. ZIGZAG handles such situations gracefully requiring a constant amortized control overhead. Especially, failure recovery can be done regionally with little impact on the existing clients and mostly no burden on the server.
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paper_title: SplitStream: high-bandwidth multicast in cooperative environments

paper_content:

In tree-based multicast systems, a relatively small number of interior nodes carry the load of forwarding multicast messages. This works well when the interior nodes are highly-available, dedicated infrastructure routers but it poses a problem for application-level multicast in peer-to-peer systems. SplitStream addresses this problem by striping the content across a forest of interior-node-disjoint multicast trees that distributes the forwarding load among all participating peers. For example, it is possible to construct efficient SplitStream forests in which each peer contributes only as much forwarding bandwidth as it receives. Furthermore, with appropriate content encodings, SplitStream is highly robust to failures because a node failure causes the loss of a single stripe on average. We present the design and implementation of SplitStream and show experimental results obtained on an Internet testbed and via large-scale network simulation. The results show that SplitStream distributes the forwarding load among all peers and can accommodate peers with different bandwidth capacities while imposing low overhead for forest construction and maintenance.
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paper_title: Mesh or Multiple-Tree: A Comparative Study of Live P2P Streaming Approaches

paper_content:

Existing approaches to P2P streaming can be divided into two general classes: (i) tree-based approaches use push-based content delivery over multiple tree-shaped overlays, and (ii) mesh-based approaches use swarming content delivery over a randomly connected mesh. Previous studies have often focused on a particular P2P streaming mechanism and no comparison between these two classes has been conducted. In this paper, we compare and contrast the performance of representative protocols from each class using simulations. We identify the similarities and differences between these two approaches. Furthermore, we separately examine the behavior of content delivery and overlay construction mechanisms for both approaches in static and dynamic scenarios. Our results indicate that the mesh-based approach consistently exhibits a superior performance over the tree-based approach. We also show that the main factors attributing in the inferior performance of the tree-based approach are (i) the static mapping of content to a particular tree, and (ii) the placement of each peer as an internal node in one tree and as a leaf in all other trees.
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paper_title: A peer-to-peer network for live media streaming using a push-pull approach

paper_content:

In this paper, we present an unstructured peer-to-peer network called GridMedia for live media streaming employing a push-pull approach. Each node in GridMedia randomly selects its neighbors in the overlay and uses push-pull method to fetch data from the neighbors. The pull mode in the unstructured overlay which is inherently robust can work well with the high churn rate in P2P environment while the push mode can efficiently reduce the accumulated latency observed at user nodes. A practical system based on this framework has been developed. And the performance evaluation of our system which is established on PlanetLab [8] demonstrates that the pull-push method in GridMedia achieves good qualities even in high group change rate. Furthermore, our system was adopted by CCTV to broadcast the Gala Evening for Spring Festival 2005 through the Internet and attracted more than 500,000 users all over the world at that night with the incredibly maximum concurrent users of 15,239.
---
paper_title: Intelligent multimedia communication : techniques and applications

paper_content:

Rate Control and Error Resilience for Object-based Video Coding .- Representation and Coding Formats for Stereo and Multiview Video.- Present and Future Video Coding Standards.- AVS Video Coding Standard.- A Resolution Adaptive Video Compression System.- Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems.- Topology Construction and Resource Allocation in P2P Live Streaming.- Intelligent Video Network Engineering with Distributed Optimization: Two Case Studies.- Media coding for streaming in networks with source and path diversity.- Peer-assisted Media Streaming: a Holistic Review.- Free-Viewpoint TV (FTV) .- UGC Video Sharing: Measurement and Analysis.- Terrestrial Television Broadcasting in China: Technologies and Applications.- Network Topology Inference for Multimedia Streaming.- Resolution-Improvement Scheme for Wireless Video Transmission.
---
paper_title: CliqueStream: an efficient and fault-resilient live streaming network on a clustered peer-to-peer overlay

paper_content:

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.
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paper_title: Analysis of PPLive through active and passive measurements

paper_content:

The P2P-IPTV is an emerging class of Internet applications that is becoming very popular. The growing popularity of these rather bandwidth demanding multimedia streaming applications has the potential to flood the Internet with a huge amount of traffic.
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paper_title: Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming Application Survey

paper_content:

Up to now, the Internet has been growing both in size and technologically. It is also not uncommon to find many types of media within a single web-page such as 3D animations, sound, video clips, online radio and TV services. Streaming is the technology which enables this, by viewing a media while downloading it. An important amount of research has been achieved to improve this bandwidth sensitive technology. Peer-To-Peer (P2P) network is at the moment one of the most effective solution to distribute streaming data within a large scale overlay, involving potentially thousands of nodes. This paper presents a survey on existing P2P media streaming systems. Our main goal is to study different P2P media streaming applications, state their results and present our analysis of each system.
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paper_title: A Measurement Study of Cache Rejection in P2P Live Streaming System

paper_content:

In P2P system, each peer caches the received data for accessing of other peers. P2P live streaming system audiencepsilas TV-like watching pattern brings unique characteristics for its cache management algorithm. By measuring and studying the cache rejection algorithm used in PPLive with our PPLive crawler, we found a simple but interesting cache rejection algorithm used in PPLive, i.e. the cache rejection of peers is synchronized with the chunk upload of media server on chunk offset. We modeled this algorithm as a fixed-duration virtual buffer which includes the P2P network and peerpsilas local buffer and then verified it in our trace. We finally gave some analysis and explanations for this algorithm. What we found is benefit to the future design and modeling of P2P live streaming system.
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paper_title: PRIME: Peer-to-Peer Receiver-drIven MEsh-Based Streaming

paper_content:

The success of swarming content delivery has motivated a new approach to live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming that we call mesh-based streaming. In this approach, participating peers form a random mesh and incorporate swarming content delivery to stream live content. Despite the growing popularity of this approach, neither the design tradeoffs nor the basic performance bottlenecks in mesh-based P2P streaming are well understood. This paper presents PRIME, the first mesh-based P2P streaming for live content that effectively incorporates swarming content delivery. We identify two performance bottlenecks in a mesh-based P2P streaming, namely bandwidth bottleneck and content bottleneck. We derive proper peer connectivity to minimize bandwidth bottleneck as well as an efficient pattern of delivery for live content over a random mesh to minimize content bottleneck. We show that the pattern of delivery can be divided into diffusion and swarming phases and then identify proper packet scheduling algorithm at individual peers. Using ns simulations, we examine key characteristics, design tradeoffs and the relationship between main system parameters.
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paper_title: Network Architectures for Live Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming

paper_content:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) media streaming networks, motivated by the huge success of P2P flle 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 e‐cient and resilient overlay architectures. In this paper, we focus on live P2P media streaming networks, a promising application ∞ourishing 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.
---
paper_title: Opportunities and Challenges of Peer-to-Peer Internet Video Broadcast

paper_content:

There have been tremendous efforts and many technical innovations in supporting real-time video streaming in the past two decades, but cost-effective large-scale video broadcast has remained an elusive goal. Internet protocol (IP) multicast represented an earlier attempt to tackle this problem but failed largely due to concerns regarding scalability, deployment, and support for higher level functionality. Recently, peer-to-peer based broadcast has emerged as a promising technique, which has been shown to be cost effective and easy to deploy. This new paradigm brings a number of unique advantages such as scalability, resilience, and effectiveness in coping with dynamics and heterogeneity. While peer-to-peer applications such as file download and voice-over-IP have gained tremendous popularity, video broadcast is still in its early stages, and its full potential remains to be seen. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of peer-to-peer Internet video broadcast technologies. We describe the basic taxonomy of peer-to-peer broadcast and summarize the major issues associated with the design of broadcast overlays. We closely examine two approaches - tree-based and data-driven - and discuss their fundamental tradeoff and potential for large-scale deployment. Lastly, we outline the key challenges and open problems and highlight possible avenues for future directions.
---
paper_title: Performance Study of Unstructured P2P Overlay Streaming Systems

paper_content:

One of the major differences among current P2P solutions for multimedia streaming is the way they organize the exchange of multimedia data among their peers. We compare the performance of two of these organizations, namely, an unrestricted mesh using a tit-for-tat incentive policy and a directed mesh that allows peers to dynamically replace poorly performing parents. We first observe that both organizations performed fairly well under ideal circumstances where all peers were cooperating and connections never failed. We then considered how the same two organizations would perform in the presence of connection failures and observe that the sole organization capable of providing a high quality of service was an unrestricted mesh organization that allowed at least eight concurrent downloads per peer. The same was not true for the directed mesh whose performance actually decreased when we allowed more than four concurrent downloads.
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paper_title: Gridmedia: A Practical Peer-to-Peer Based Live Video Streaming System

paper_content:

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a peer-to-peer based live video streaming system called Gridmedia. Gridmedia organizes the nodes into an unstructured overlay, and adopts a novel push-pull streaming mechanism to fetch data from the partner nodes. The pull mode in the unstructured overlay can work well with the high churn rate in P2P environment while the push mode can efficiently reduce the accumulated latency at user side. We also depict our practical solution of traversal over network address translators (NATs) and firewalls. Gridmedia was adopted by CCTV to broadcast the CCTV Spring Festival Gala 2005 through Internet and attracted more than 500,000 users all over the world during that night, with the maximum amount of concurrent users reaches as high as 15,239
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paper_title: AnySee: Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming

paper_content:

Efficient and scalable live-streaming overlay construction has become a hot topic recently. In order to improve the performance metrics, such as startup delay, source-to-end delay, and playback continuity, most previous studies focused on intra-overlay optimization. Such approaches have drawbacks including low resource utilization, high startup and source-to-end delay, and unreasonable resource assignment in global P2P networks. Anysee is a peer-to-peer live streaming system and adopts an inter-overlay optimization scheme, in which resources can join multiple overlays, so as to (1) improve global resource utilization and distribute traffic to all physical links evenly; (2) assign resources based on their locality and delay; (3) guarantee streaming service quality by using the nearest peers, even when such peers might belong to different overlays; and (4) balance the load among the group members. We compare the performance of our design with existing approaches based on comprehensive trace driven simulations. Results show that AnySee outperforms previous schemes in resource utilization and the QoS of streaming services. AnySee has been implemented as an Internet based live streaming system, and was successfully released in the summer of 2004 in CERNET of China. Over 60,000 users enjoy massive entertainment programs, including TV programs, movies, and academic conferences. Statistics prove that this design is scalable and robust, and we believe that the wide deployment of AnySee will soon benefit many more Internet users.
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paper_title: Robust video-on-demand streaming in peer-to-peer environments

paper_content:

This paper presents a new video-on-demand streaming technique in peer-to-peer (P2P) environments. While a number of P2P live video streaming techniques have been proposed in the past, we argue that the two types of video streaming, live and on-demand, have some subtle differences. Most notably, a P2P video-on-demand streaming technique has to handle the asynchronous arrival of peers efficiently, and provide robust recovery under the rather frequent peers' failure. Our answer to the challenge is an application multicast tree, called P2VoD (Peer-To-peer for Video-On-Demand streaming). P2VoD proposes a number of ideas, including a caching scheme, a generation concept, and a distributed directory service. Through analytical analysis, we show that P2VoD is sound and efficient. We also compare P2VoD against a recently proposed P2Cast system by Guo et al. [Y. Guo, K. Suh, J.F. Kurose, D.F. Towsley, P2cast: peer-to-peer patching scheme for vod service., in: WWW, 2003, pp. 301-309] using both analytical analysis and simulation. The result shows that P2VoD performs better than P2Cast in a number of important performance metrics.
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paper_title: Efficient substream encoding and transmission for P2P video on demand

paper_content:

In a P2P VoD system, the rate at which peers receive video fluctuates due to peer churn. Although scalable video coding has the potential to adapt to long-term rate variations, existing scalable video schemes have not been tailored for P2P systems for which substreams emanate from churning peers. In this paper we propose a new multi-stream coding and transmission scheme, Redundancy-Free Multiple Description (RFMD) Coding and Transmission, that has been designed for P2P VoD systems. Unlike layered video, with RFMD all substreams have equal importance. Thus, video quality gracefully degrades as substreams are lost, independently of which particular substreams are lost. Furthermore, only the source bits are collectively transmitted by the supplying peers. Thus, all transmitted bits contribute to improve video quality. Finally, RFMD can be used to create any number of descriptions. We conduct an extensive simulation study, comparing single layer coding with highrate erasure codes, layered coding, multiple description coding (MD-FEC) and RFMD. The simulations show that RFMD performs best in a variety of representative scenarios.
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paper_title: Providing video-on-demand using peer-to-peer networks

paper_content:

Digital media companies have recently started embracing peer-assisted distribution networks as an alternative to traditional client-server architectures [5]. Such Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures ensure a fast and scalable delivery of media content. However, their drawback is that users need to often wait for the full video to be downloaded before they can start watching it. While a lot of effort has gone into optimizing the distribution of large video files using P2P swarming techniques, little research has been done on how to ensure a small start-up time and a sustainable playback rate to enable a play-asyou-download experience. In this work, we address the challenges underlying the problem of near Video-on-Demand (nVoD) using P2P swarming systems, and provide evidence that high-quality nVoD is feasible. In particular, we investigate the scheduling problem of efficiently disseminating the blocks of a video file in a P2P mesh-based system, and show that pre-fetching and network coding techniques can provide significant benefits. Our results show that, for videos which are 120 minutes in duration, 10 minutes (≈ 8% of the video’s length) of buffering at start-up can enable playback rates that are close (up to 80 − 90%) to the access link capacity, even under dynamic changes of the user population.
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paper_title: P2VoD: providing fault tolerant video-on-demand streaming in peer-to-peer environment

paper_content:

We present a system for video-on-demand streaming in peer-to-peer environment. We start by realizing the major differences between two types of streaming: live and on-demand. These observations lead to a set of problems that need to be solved for a peer-to-peer video-on-demand system. To address these problems, we propose a solution, which includes detail algorithms for building and maintaining an application multicast tree. The novel ideas in this paper are the use of a new caching scheme at clients, and the introduction of generation for better client management. Performance study based on simulation is carried out. The results show that our system outperforms a recently proposed system in a number of important performance metrics.
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paper_title: P2Cast: peer-to-peer patching scheme for VoD service

paper_content:

Providing video on demand (VoD) service over the Internet in a scalable way is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose P2Cast - an architecture that uses a peer-to-peer approach to cooperatively stream video using patching techniques, while only relying on unicast connections among peers. We address the following two key technical issues in P2Cast: (1) constructing an application overlay appropriate for streaming; and (2) providing continuous stream playback (without glitches) in the face of disruption from an early departing client. Our simulation experiments show that P2Cast can serve many more clients than traditional client-server unicast service, and that it generally out-performs multicast-based patching if clients can cache more than of a stream's initial portion. We handle disruptions by delaying the start of playback and applying the shifted forwarding technique. A threshold on the length of time during which arriving clients are served in a single session in P2Cast serves as a knob to adjust the balance between the scalability and the clients' viewing quality in P2Cast.
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paper_title: A peer-to-peer on-demand streaming service and its performance evaluation

paper_content:

Providing on-demand video streaming service over the Internet is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose DirectStream, a directory based peer-to-peer video streaming service that efficiently and cost-effectively provides video on-demand service with VCR operation support. We analytically and experimentally examine the system performance, and show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the workload posed on the server, and that it scales extremely well as the popularity of the video increases even if participating clients behave non-cooperatively. We propose a QoS parent selection algorithm to construct the appropriate peer-to-peer networks, and discuss how to provide continuous playback in the face of clients' early departures. Our study suggests that peer-to-peer networking is a promising technique to address scalability in on-demand streaming service.
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paper_title: Video-on-Demand Streaming in P2P Environment

paper_content:

In order to provide the VoD Service over the Internet, a large amount of system and network resources are needed . Various overlay multicast schemes are suitable solutions but they have some drawbacks to support VoD Service. In this paper we present a system based overlay multicast, which could saves the network bandwidth efficiently and decreases the stress of VoD server. Our main ideas are the buffer structure and three type of client join algorithm. Simulation results show that our model decreases the server stress efficiently.
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paper_title: BASS: BitTorrent Assisted Streaming System for Video-on-Demand

paper_content:

This paper introduces a hybrid server/P2P streaming system called bittorrent-assisted streaming system (BASS) for large-scale video-on-demand (VoD) services. By distributing the load among P2P connections as well as maintaining active server connections, BASS can increase the system scalability while decreasing media playout wait times. To analyze the benefits of BASS, we examine torrent trace data collected in the first week of distribution for Fedora Core 3 and develop an empirical model of bittorrent client performance. Based on this, we run trace-based simulations to evaluate BASS and show that it is more scalable than current unicast solutions and can greatly decrease the average waiting time before playback
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paper_title: BiToS: Enhancing BitTorrent for Supporting Streaming Applications

paper_content:

BitTorrent (BT) in the last years has been one of the most effective mechanisms for P2P content distribution. Although BT was created for distribution of time insensitive content, in this work we try to identify what are the minimal changes needed in the BT's mechanisms in order to support streaming. The importance of this capability is that the peer will now have the ability to start enjoying the video before the complete download of the video file. This ability is particularly important in highly polluted environments, since the peer can evaluate the quality of the video content early and thus preserve its valuable resources. In a nutshell, our approach gives higher download priority to pieces that are close to be reproduced by the player. This comes in contrast to the original BT protocol, where pieces are downloaded in an out-of-order manner based solely on their rareness. In particular, our approach tries to strike the balance between downloading pieces in: (a) playing order, enabling smooth playback, and (b) the rarest first order, enabling the use of parallel downloading of pieces. In this work, we introduce three different Piece Selection mechanisms and we evaluate them through simulations based on how well they deliver streaming services to the peers.
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paper_title: COCONET: Co-operative Cache Driven Overlay NETwork for p2p Vod Streaming

paper_content:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approaches are gaining increasing popularity for video streaming applications due to their potential for Internet-level scalability. P2P VoD (Video On-Demand) applications pose more technical challenges than P2P live streaming since the peers are less synchronized over time as the playing position varies widely across the total video length along with the requirement to support VCR operations such as random seek, Fast-Forward and Backward (FF/FB). We propose COCONET in this paper, which uses a distributed cache partly contributed by each participant thereby achieving a random content distribution pattern independent of the playing position. It also achieves an O(1) search efficiency for any random seek and FF/FB operation to any video segment across the total video stream with very low maintenance cost through any streaming overlay size. Performance evaluation by simulation indicates the effectiveness of COCONET to support our claim.
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paper_title: On-demand Video Streaming in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

paper_content:

Providing on-demand video streaming services to large numbers of nodes in mobile wireless networks is a challenging task. We propose MOVi (mobile opportunistic video-on-demand), a mobile peer-to-peer video-on-demand application based on ubiquitous WiFi enabled devices such as smartphones and Ultra Mobile PCs. MOVi poses new challenges in on-demand video streaming caused by limited wireless communication range, user mobility and variable user population density. MOVi addresses these challenges by exploiting the opportunistic mix use of downlink and direct peer-to-peer communication to significantly improve achievable overall system throughput. Through simulation and actual implementation, we observed that MOVi is able to increase the number of supported concurrent users two fold compared with unicast based on-demand video streaming, as well as reducing video start-up delay by half. Significantly, these performance improvements can be achieved without increasing power consumption at the end device. Using MOVi, users not only share and distribute on-demand video such as YouTube clips for their own performance gain but also for the benefit of the collaborative group.
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paper_title: An optimal broadcasting protocol for mobile video-on-demand

paper_content:

The advance of wireless and mobile technology introduces a new type of Video-on-Demand (VOD) systems, namely the mobile VOD systems, that provide VOD services to mobile clients. It is a challenge to design broadcasting protocols for such systems because of the following special requirements: (1) fixed maximum bandwidth requirement: the maximum bandwidth required for broadcasting a video should be fixed and independent of the number of requests, (2) load adaptivity: the total bandwidth should be dependent on the number of requests; the fewer the requests the smaller the total bandwidth usage, and (3) clients sensitivity: the system should be able to support clients with a wide range of heterogeneous capabilities. In the literature, there are some partial solutions that give protocols meeting one or two of the above requirements. In this paper, we give the first protocol that meets all of the three requirements. The performance of our protocol is optimal up to a small constant factor.
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paper_title: P2MVOD: peer-to-peer mobile video on-demand

paper_content:

We propose a new form of distributed multimedia communication, peer-to-peer mobile video on-demand (P2MVOD), that enables users to share an unlimited amount of video content without spatial and time constraints. P2MVOD allows a moving client to receive streaming data on demand from other moving clients in a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. Our scheme uses multicast VOD technology. To overcome mobile routing overhead and the service vulnerability of P2P, it divides video content into the same sized segments and broadcasts them from multiple clients. Broadcasting obviously consumes much bandwidth, but the segment aggregation allows content to be received by as many clients as possible, thus counteracting the resulting increase in traffic. Numerical analysis revealed the characteristics of the broadcast traffic on a network, the effectiveness of the segment aggregation, and the range of applications.
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paper_title: Streaming To Mobile Users In A Peer-to-Peer Network

paper_content:

Streaming video to mobile users is rapidly emerging as a crucial multimedia service. One of the stumbling blocks in mobile streaming is the heterogeneity found in mobile devices: diverse display size, computing power, memory, and media capabilities. Given this heterogeneity, video transcoding is often required to satisfy the requirements of different mobile users. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) method for mobile streaming. In the proposed method, peers other than mobile users, called fixed nodes, contribute their computing power for transcoding. We further propose the interleaved distributed transcoding (IDT) scheme that allows multiple fixed nodes to perform transcoding for a mobile device. Distributed transcoding not only lowers computation at fixed nodes, but also achieves error resilience against packet loss. The IDT scheme conforms to the H.264/AVC baseline profile, which requires no modification to decoders found in many mobile phones. We analyzed the effect of distributed transcoding under peer churn. Extensive simulations show that mobile streaming based on the proposed scheme is robust to packet loss due to peer churn and adverse wireless channel conditions.
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paper_title: RTSP-based Mobile Peer-to-Peer Streaming System

paper_content:

Peer-to-peer is emerging as a potentially disruptive ::: technology for content distribution in the mobile Internet. In ::: addition to the already well-known peer-to-peer file sharing, real-time ::: peer-to-peer streaming is gaining popularity. This paper ::: presents an effective real-time peer-to-peer streaming system for ::: the mobile environment. The basis for the system is a scalable ::: overlay network which groups peer into clusters according to ::: their proximity using RTT values between peers as a criteria for ::: the cluster selection. The actual media delivery in the system is ::: implemented using the partial RTP stream concept: the original ::: RTP sessions related to a media delivery are split into a number ::: of so-called partial streams according to a predefined set of ::: parameters in such a way that it allows low-complexity reassembly ::: of the original media session in real-time at the receiving ::: end. Partial streams also help in utilizing the upload capacity ::: with finer granularity than just per one original stream. This ::: is beneficial in mobile environments where bandwidth can be scarce.
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paper_title: A novel P2P and cloud computing hybrid architecture for multimedia streaming with QoS cost functions

paper_content:

Since its appearance, peer-to-peer technology has given raise to various multimedia streaming applications. Today, cloud computing offers different service models as a base for successful end user applications. In this paper we propose joining peer-to-peer and cloud computing into new architectural realization of a distributed cloud computing network for multimedia streaming, in a both centralized and peer-to-peer distributed manner. This architecture merges private and public clouds and it is intended for a commercial use, but in the same time scalable to offer the possibility of non-profitable use. In order to take advantage of the cloud paradigm and make multimedia streaming more efficient, we introduce APIs in the cloud, containing build-in functions for automatic QoS calculation, which permits negotiating QoS parameters such as bandwidth, jitter and latency, among a cloud service provider and its potential clients.
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paper_title: AngelCast: cloud-based peer-assisted live streaming using optimized multi-tree construction

paper_content:

Increasingly, commercial content providers (CPs) offer streaming and IPTV solutions that leverage an underlying peer-to-peer (P2P) stream distribution architecture. The use of P2P protocols promises significant scalability and cost savings by leveraging the local resources of clients -- specifically, uplink capacity. A major limitation of P2P live streaming is that playout rates are constrained by the uplink capacities of clients, which are typically much lower than downlink capacities, thus limiting the quality of the delivered stream. Thus, to leverage P2P architectures without sacrificing the quality of the delivered stream, CPs must commit additional resources to complement those available through clients. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based service -- AngelCast -- that enables CPs to elastically complement P2P streaming "as needed". By subscribing to AngelCast, a CP is able to deploy extra resources ("angels"), on-demand from the cloud, to maintain a desirable stream (bit-rate) quality. Angels need not download the whole stream (they are not "leachers"), nor are they in possession of it (they are not "seeders"). Rather, angels only relay (download once and upload as many times as needed) the minimal possible fraction of the stream that is necessary to achieve the desirable stream quality, while maximally utilizing available client resources. We provide a lower bound on the minimum amount of angel capacity needed to maintain a certain bit-rate to all clients, and develop a fluid model construction that achieves this lower bound. Realizing the limitations of the fluid model construction -- namely, susceptibility to potentially arbitrary start-up delays and significant degradation due to churn -- we present a practical multi-tree construction that captures the spirit of the optimal construction, while avoiding its limitations. In particular, our AngelCast protocol achieves near optimal performance (compared to the fluid-model construction) while ensuring a low startup delay by maintaining a logarithmic-length path between any client and the provider, and while gracefully dealing with churn by adopting a flexible membership management approach. We present the blueprints of a prototype implementation of AngelCast, along with experimental results confirming the feasibility and performance potential of our AngelCast service when deployed on Emulab and PlanetLab.
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paper_title: On the effect of free-riders in P2P streaming systems

paper_content:

Peer-to-peer applications exploit the users willingness to contribute with their upload transmission capacity, achieving this way a scalable system where the available transmission capacity increases with the number of participating users. Since not all the users can offer upload capacity with high bitrate and reliability, it is of interest to see how these non-contributing users can be supported by a peer-to-peer application. In this paper we investigate how free-riders, that is, non-contributing users can be served in a peer-to-peer streaming system. We consider different policies of dealing with free-riders and discuss how performance parameters such as blocking and disconnection of free-riders are influenced by these policies, the overlay structure and system parameters as overlay size and source upload capacity. The results show that while the multiple-tree structure may affect the performance free-riders receive, the utilization of the transmission resources is still comparable to that of an optimized overlay.
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paper_title: A Payment-based Incentive and Service Differentiation Mechanism for Peer-to-Peer Streaming Broadcast

paper_content:

We proposes a novel payment-based incentive mechanism for peer-to-peer (P2P) live media streaming. Using this approach, peers earn points by forwarding data to others; the data streaming is divided into fixed length periods, during each of which peers compete with each other for good parents (data suppliers) for the next period in a first-price auction like procedure using their points. We design a distributed algorithm to regulate peer competitions, and consider various individual strategies for parent selection from a game theoretic perspective. We then discuss possible strategies that can be used to maximize a peer's expected media quality by planning different bids for its substreams. Finally, in order to encourage off-session users to keep staying online and continue contributing to the network, we develop an optimal data forwarding strategy that allows peers to accumulate points that can be used in future services. Simulations results show that proposed methods effectively differentiate the media qualities received by peers making different contributions (which originate from, for example, different forwarding band-widths or servicing times), and at the same time maintaining a high system-wide performance
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paper_title: Identifying malicious nodes in network-coding-based peer-to-peer streaming networks

paper_content:

Researchers show that network coding can greatly improve the quality of service in P2P live streaming systems (e.g., IPTV). However, network coding is vulnerable to pollution attacks where malicious nodes inject into the network bogus data blocks that will be combined with other legitimate blocks at downstream nodes, leading to incapability of decoding the original blocks and degradation of network performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to limiting pollution attacks by identifying malicious nodes. In our scheme, the malicious nodes can be rapidly identified and isolated, so that the system can quickly recover from pollution attacks. Our scheme can fully satisfy the requirements of live streaming systems, and achieves much higher efficiency than previous schemes. Each node in our scheme only needs to perform several hash computations for an incoming block, incurring very small computational latency in the range of several microseconds. The space overhead added to each block is only 20 bytes. The verification information given to each node is independent of the streaming content and thus does not need to be redistributed. The simulation results based on real PPLive channel overlays show that the process of identifying malicious nodes only takes a few seconds even in the presence of a large number of malicious nodes.
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paper_title: A reputation-based approach for choosing reliable resources in peer-to-peer networks

paper_content:

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have seen an enormous success, and recently introduced P2P services have reached tens of millions of users. A feature that significantly contributes to the success of many P2P applications is user anonymity. However, anonymity opens the door to possible misuses and abuses, exploiting the P2P network as a way to spread tampered with resources, including Trojan Horses, viruses, and spam. To address this problem we propose a self-regulating system where the P2P network is used to implement a robust reputation mechanism. Reputation sharing is realized through a distributed polling algorithm by which resource requestors can assess the reliability of a resource offered by a participant before initiating the download. This way, spreading of malicious contents will be reduced and eventually blocked. Our approach can be straightforwardly piggybacked on existing P2P protocols and requires modest modifications to current implementations.
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paper_title: Incentive mechanism for peer-to-peer media streaming

paper_content:

We propose a rank-based peer-selection mechanism for peer-to-peer media streaming systems. The mechanism provides incentives for cooperation through service differentiation. Contributors to the system are rewarded with flexibility and choice in peer selection, resulting in high quality streaming sessions. Free-riders are given limited options in peer selection, if any, and hence receive low quality streaming. Through simulation and wide-area measurement studies, we verify that the mechanism can provide near optimal streaming quality to the cooperative users until the bottleneck shifts from the sources to the network.
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paper_title: The pollution attack in P2P live video streaming: measurement results and defenses

paper_content:

P2P mesh-pull live video streaming applications ---such as Cool-Streaming, PPLive, and PPStream --- have become popular in the recent years. In this paper, we examine the stream pollution attack, for which the attacker mixes polluted chunks into the P2P distribution, degrading the quality of the rendered media at the receivers. Polluted chunks received by an unsuspecting peer not only effect that single peer, but since the peer also forwards chunks to other peers, and those peers in turn forward chunks to more peers, the polluted content can potentially spread through much of the P2P network. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, by way of experimenting and measuring a popular P2P live video streaming system, we show that the pollution attack can be devastating. Second, we evaluate the applicability of four possible defenses to the pollution attack: blacklisting, traffic encryption, hash verification, and chunk signing. Among these, we conclude that the chunk signing solutions are most suitable.
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paper_title: Pollution-resistant peer-to-peer live streaming using trust management

paper_content:

In the emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming, users cooperate with each other to support efficient delivery of video over networks in live streaming applications. Pollution attack is an effective attack against P2P live streaming, where attackers upload bogus multimedia data to their peers. The polluted data can spread over the entire network, and cause severe quality degradation of the videos. To resist pollution attacks in P2P live streaming, this paper proposes a trust management system that identifies attackers and excludes them from further sharing of multimedia data. We investigate possible attacks against the trust management system and analyze the attack resistance of the proposed system. Our simulation results show that the proposed trust management system can efficiently detect attackers and stimulate user cooperation even under attacks. It helps users receive more clean data and improves the performance of P2P live streaming.
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Title: A Review on P2P Video Streaming

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: This section introduces the evolution of video streaming, highlighting the significance of P2P in the context of video streaming on the Internet.

Section 2: Existing Streaming Networks
Description 2: This section discusses the various existing streaming networks, including their architectures and methods of operation.

Section 3: Web Based Distribution
Description 3: This section describes web-based distribution techniques for streaming, including the issues related to server overloading and how CDNs help manage server loads.

Section 4: On-Demand Multimedia Streaming
Description 4: This section elaborates on the architecture and mechanisms of Video on Demand (VoD) services.

Section 5: Live Video Streaming
Description 5: This section addresses the architecture and implementation of live video streaming services, such as IPTV.

Section 6: Failure of Traditional Streaming Techniques
Description 6: This section discusses the limitations and challenges of traditional client-server and CDN-based streaming techniques.

Section 7: Peer-to-Peer Networks
Description 7: This section introduces P2P networks, highlighting their features, types, and benefits for streaming.

Section 8: Challenges in P2P Streaming
Description 8: This section outlines the technological and networking challenges faced by P2P streaming systems.

Section 9: Approaches for Overlay Construction
Description 9: This section categorizes and describes the various overlay structures used in P2P streaming, such as tree-based, mesh-based, and hybrid schemes.

Section 10: P2P on Demand Video Streaming
Description 10: This section examines P2P-based VoD systems, discussing both tree-based and mesh-based architectures.

Section 11: Mobile Video-on-Demand
Description 11: This section explores the challenges and techniques related to providing VoD services over mobile networks (MANETs).

Section 12: Mobile Live Streaming
Description 12: This section discusses live video streaming in mobile environments and the solutions proposed for overcoming related challenges.

Section 13: P2P Streaming and Cloud
Description 13: This section reviews the integration of P2P streaming with cloud computing to enhance streaming services.

Section 14: Security in P2P Video Streaming
Description 14: This section covers the security challenges in P2P video streaming and the mechanisms to address these issues, including trust management and countermeasures against attacks.

Section 15: Summary
Description 15: This section provides a summary of the findings and insights on P2P video streaming, highlighting the main points discussed in the paper.