Server-Aided Adaptive Live Video Streaming Over P2P Networks

Three factors, including churn of peers, high transmission delay, and high bandwidth heterogeneity, jointly bring forward great challenges to video streaming over P2P networks. In this paper, the multi-tree approach is leveraged to construct an overlay with resilience to churn and low transmission delay. For such a multi-tree structured overlay, a server-aided adaptive video streaming scheme is proposed to cope with the bandwidth heterogeneity. During streaming process, video data are collaboratively forwarded to the same receiver by multiple peers based on side information and network condition, as well as the distributed bitstream is dynamically switched among multiple available versions in a rate-distortion optimized way by the streaming server. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves great gain in overall perceived quality over simple heuristic schemes.