Peer-to-peer live video streaming on the internet: issues, existing approaches, and challenges [Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming]

Live video streaming is perhaps the greatest unfulfilled promise of the Internet. There have been tremendous efforts in the design and experimentation of video-streaming systems in the past two decades; there have been no shortage of technical innovations, yet no single system has delivered the scale and service quality. The fundamental problem that throttles the large-scale deployment of Internet video streaming is the dissatisfaction end-users experience with performance. This is caused by a combination of many factors, such as the autonomous nature of the Internet, inherent instability, and lack of a service guarantee. This is further challenged by sustainable bandwidth and the stringent continuity requirements of streaming applications. Recent development of P2P-based streaming technology brings unprecedented new momentum to Internet video streaming, which has been shown to be cost-effective, scalable, and easy to deploy. This article reviews the state-of-the-art P2P live video-streaming technologies and their development from a historic perspective. Based on our earlier success with a large-scale P2P streaming system, Coolstreaming, we summarize the main innovations and discuss the key trade offs in the system design. We present our observations on the future development and offer a few insights for further discussion.     

Video streaming over P2P networks: Challenges and opportunities

A robust real-time video communication service over the Internet in a distributed manner is an important challenge, as it influences not only the current Internet structure but also the future Internet evolution. In this context, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are playing an imperative position for providing efficient video transmission over the Internet. Recently, several P2P video transmission systems have been proposed for live video streaming services or video-on-demand services over the Internet. In this paper, we describe and discuss existing video streaming systems over P2P. Efficient (delay tolerant and intolerant) data sharing mechanisms in P2P and current video coding trends are elaborated in detail. Moreover, video streaming solutions (live and on-demand) over P2P from the perspective of tree-based and mesh-based systems are explained. Finally, the conclusion is drawn with key challenges and open issues related to video streaming over P2P.     

Enabling adaptive video streaming in P2P systems [Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming]

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to deliver large amounts of data at a reduced deployment cost. In addition to fostering the development of novel media applications, P2P systems also represent an interesting alternative paradigm for media streaming applications that can benefit from the inherent self organization and resource scalability available in such environments. This article presents an overview of application and network layer mechanisms that enable successful streaming frameworks in peer-to-peer systems. We describe media delivery architectures that can be deployed over P2P networks to address the specific requirements of streaming applications. In particular, we show how video-streaming applications can benefit from the diversity offered by P2P systems and implement distributed-streaming and scheduling solutions with multi-path packet transmission.     

IPTV over P2P streaming networks: the mesh-pull approach

IPTV, an emerging Internet application, would revolutionize the entertainment and media industries; however, IPTV also has the potential to overwhelm the Internet backbone and access networks with traffic. To date, IPTV over P2P streaming networks has advanced significantly using two different approaches: tree-push versus mesh-pull. In particular, the mesh-pull streaming approach has achieved a number of successful commercial deployments. In this article, we examine the current progress in the research and development of mesh-pull P2P streaming systems. We provide an overview of the general mesh-pull streaming architecture and review various challenges, design issues, and interesting research problems in this approach. We discuss the construction costs for providing an IPTV service with service guarantees. We outline a measurement technique for monitoring the video playback quality of mesh-pull streaming systems. We emphasize that the future P2P IPTV systems should be designed to meet the expectations of users for quality-of-experience. We also identify a few other important issues for IPTV over P2P streaming networks, including the traffic pressure on ISPs, various security concerns, and the necessity to re-examine the most appropriate P2P architecture. Insights obtained in this study will be valuable for the development and deployment of future P2P IPTV systems.     

P2P网络流媒体关键技术

P2P网络流媒体技术一直是学术界和产业界的研究热点.本文围绕覆盖网络拓扑结构,对现有的P2P流媒体系统作了全面的归类总结,深入介绍和分析了覆盖网络构建、数据块调度策略等P2P流媒体核心技术,并概要讨论视频编码、网络编码、覆盖网络拓扑优化、安全与激励机制等P2P流媒体相关增强技术.对典型P2P流媒体系统的性能进行了比较,...     

Building a cooperative P2P-TV application over a wise network: the approach of the European FP-7 strep NAPA-WINE [very large projects]

Introduction TV services over the Internet can be provided by either exploiting IP multicast functionalities or relying on a pure peer-to-peer (P2P) approach. The first technique will only work on a network infrastructure controlled by a single broadband operator due to limitations of IP multicast facilities. The main goal of the project is the study of a future system suitable for HQTV live streaming over the Internet based on P2P technology, or a P2P-HQTV system. The major focus is on overcoming today's pure layered approach through a cooperative paradigm in which the application and network layers cooperate to optimize the quality of service offered to end users.     

P2P流媒体网络电视通信机制研究

近年来兴起的P2P流媒体网络电视成为了Internet上的一种主要应用,分析和研究P2P流媒体系统对于识别其流量和日后开发类似的系统具有很强的指导意义.本文选取PPStream和QQLive两款常用软件通过抓取其流量数据进行协议分析,主要关注系统获取节点列表、资源交换和数据传输等实现方法,进而总结出了一套P2P流媒体协议分析框架,提出了一种基于协议分析的流量识别方法.     

Timely traffic identification on P2P streaming media

Since the year of 2006,peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming media service has been developing rapidly,the user scale and income scale achieve synchronous growth.However,while people enjoying the benefits of th...     

面向运营商的P2P流媒体系统架构

针对现有流媒体系统存在的主要问题,本文提出了一种面向电信运营商的可运营、可管理、可扩展的P2P流媒体系统架构,并给出了该架构下流媒体点播业务的实现流程以及主要的资源调度和管理流程.该系统的建立可有效解决困扰业界已久的内容盗版、用户收费、质量保障等关键问题,协助P2P流媒体确立自身盈利模式.     

一个基于速率控制的Internet视频流服务方案

由于视频流服务对于网络服务质量有着较高的要求,而现有的Internet所提供的是尽力而为的服务,无法保证数据的实时传输。该文设计了一个用于Internet上视频流的端到端传输方案.整个方案设计的目的是在网络本身缺乏服务质量保证的条件下尽可能达到最好的视频传输质量。根据可用带宽估计和网络信息反馈,系统对发送速率进行调整,并提供两种视频流服务:存储视频和实时视频。仿真结果表明方案的性能良好,能满足Internet视频流的需求。     

Will IPTV ride the peer-to-peer stream? [Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming]

The great success of P2P systems for the purpose of file-sharing set the path to the next killer application on the Internet, P2P video streaming. Although it solves scalability issues, P2P technology experiences problems of a long start time and churn-induced instability that can greatly affect the user experience. Moreover, technical and business solutions for digital rights management are still under investigation. Great efforts are underway in both academia and industry to solve these problems, whose solution will offer a scalable, affordable, and legal TV-quality-like broadcast of content. In this article, we analyze what is available to the end user in terms of P2P video-streaming products and determine which of these are the most promising for IPTV and content distribution companies. In the following, we offer: (1) A survey of the available architectures. (2) A set of experiments on a popular peer-to-peer system, SopCast. (3) Guidelines for large scale deployment.     

Inferring Network-Wide Quality in P2P Live Streaming Systems

This paper explores how to remotely monitor network-wide quality in mesh-pull P2P live streaming systems. Peers in such systems advertise to each other buffer maps which summarize the chunks of the video stream that they currently have cached and make available for sharing. We demonstrate how buffer maps can be exploited to monitor network-wide quality. We show that the information provided in a peer's advertised buffer map correlates with that peer's viewing-continuity and startup latency. Given this correlation, we remotely harvest buffer maps from many peers and then process these buffer maps to estimate the video playback quality. We apply this methodology to a popular P2P live streaming system, namely, PPLive. To harvest buffer maps, we build a buffer-map crawler and also deploy passive sniffing nodes. We process the harvested buffer maps and present results for network-wide playback continuity, startup latency, playback lags among peers, and chunk propagation patterns. The results show that this methodology can provide reasonably accurate estimates of ongoing video playback quality throughout the network.     

P2P流媒体服务质量关键技术的研究

流媒体应用已成为当今互联网承载的主要业务之一,如何支持大规模用户在线使用流媒体,并保障流媒体的服务质量(QoS)尤为重要。依据P2P技术的特点和流媒体系统的发展,对比分析了典型流媒体系统的流服务策略,总结归纳了系统的优点与不足。以节点选择机制、数据调度机制、缓存机制、容错机制、激励机制为评价指标,重点对当前流媒体系统服务质量研究进行评述。最后对保障大规模可信流媒体服务质量的研究方向进行了展望。     

P2P流媒体模型的资源传输机制

针对流媒体的点播和直播服务,提出了基于P2P的流媒体应用层多播和点播的解决方案,构建了基于超级节点和普通节点的两层体系结构的视频流媒体模型.描述了模型的总体结构,分析了资源传输机制.基于校园网对模型进行了测试,测试结果表明,模型能够实现基于流媒体应用的多点数据快速互传.     

SDHT:面向P2P直播系统的高效单跳分布式哈希查找策略

Video data location plays a key role for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live streaming applications. In this paper, we propose a new one-hop Distributed Hash Table (DHT) lookup framework called Streaming-DHT (SDHT) to provide efficient video data location service. By adopting an enhanced events dissemination mechanism-EDRA+ , the accuracy of routing table at peers can be guaranteed. More importantly, in order to enhance the performance of video data lookup operation without incurring extra overhead, we design a so-called Distributed Index Mapping and Management Mechanism (DIMM) for SDHT. Both analytical modeling and intensive simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of SDHT framework. Numerical results show that almost 90% requested video data can be retrieved within one second in SDHT based systems, and SDHT needs only 26% average bandwidth consumption when compared with similar one-hop DHT solutions such as D1HT. This indicates that SDHT framework is an appropriate data lookup solution for time-sensitive network applications such as P2P live streaming.     

Adaptive tree-based P2P video streaming multicast system under high peer-churn rate

This paper presents an adaptive tree-based P2P video streaming multicast system under high peer-churn rate. Because peers typically display dynamic and unstable behavior during the session, a P2P video streaming multicast tree must take into account both the link delay and peer stability in order to provide a seamless video streaming multicast service with low delay. Hence, we need to adaptively update the multicast tree according to its time-varying environments in order to obtain an effective tradeoff between the delay of the tree and the relative peer stability over multicast tree. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.     

Slack time–based scheduling scheme for live video streaming in P2P network

Nowadays, peer‐to‐peer network plays a significant role in data transfer and communication. The past few years have witnessed considerable growth in this area because of its inherent advantages. Peer‐to‐peer live streaming has a significant impact on video transmission over the Internet. Major factors that influence the performance of P2P live streaming are overlay construction and scheduling strategies. Although, a large number of scheduling schemes are developed but none of them is comprehensive enough to provide solutions to live streaming issues. These suffer from substantial delay and low video quality at the receiver side. In this paper, a new start‐up–based selection procedure and slack time–based scheduling scheme is proposed. The start‐up selection procedure defines the start‐up buffer location for new peer, and the scheduling scheme selects both the chunk and peers. The proposed scheduling scheme uses both push and pull priority–based strategies. The simulation results of the proposed approach demonstrates significant improvement in both the network performance and video quality at the receiver side. It is observed that playback delay, startup delay, and end‐to‐end delay in the network are reduced and quality of the video at receiver side is improved as the distortion and frame loss ratio is decreased.     

一种基于P2P流媒体的网络教学系统设计

随着互联网的迅速发展,远程网络教育已经逐渐普及。然而已有的网络技术不支持动态多媒体数据和实时流数据,且存在着流媒体技术中服务器的承载问题。针对这些问题设计基于P2P流媒体技术的网络教育系统,其中每个网络节点既是服务的消费者又是服务的提供者,针对Web服务模式,有效地解决了流媒体系统中存在的问题,同时具有对网络带宽和服务器处理能力要求低、易部署和易扩展的特点。     

基于P2P网络流媒体直播系统研究与设计

主要讨论了一种基于P2P网络的流媒体直播的相关技术,研究设计了一个支持大量用户同时在线的直播系统方案,能够充分利用客户端资源,减轻服务器负载,并实现较好的视频直播效果,该系统采用了P2P传输技术,系统的可扩展性和稳定性都明显优于传统流媒体视频传输系统.     

P2P发展现状与运营方案

P2P技术和应用发展迅速,对电信业务和运营造成了巨大冲击。运营商需精细化管道运营,发展特色P2P业务,遵循互联网业务的规律,结合在网络、资源、用户等方面的优势设计可管理可运营的P2P解决方案,使用户获得更好的P2P业务体验。中兴通讯可运营可管理的P2P解决方案,可根据运营商的要求进行鉴权和计费,利用现网得到广泛使用的宽带业务管理平台进行开发,系统稳定可靠。