Quality of service aware peer-to-peer video streaming

Abstract

As the demand for Internet TV is growing with some of the biggest companies which support the Internet infrastructure such as CISCO declare, video will be taking the greatest portion of the Internet backbone in the near future, systems such as peer-to-peer Video Streaming need to be studied and deployed in order to support this demand. In a system like a peer-to-peer video stream, a source distributor streams a video multicast while maintaining a large population of peers. The system benefits from the peer's resources such as computational power and bandwidth, making use of their forwarding capacity. This type of system differs from the traditional server client systems where the server has to issue a streaming connection for every connected client, in peer-to-peer system the server issues a small number of streams according to the number of directly connected peers to the server which decreases the load from the server drastically. In this type of system peers may disconnect at any time, therefore a robust control protocol is needed to maintain connectivity between the connected peers. This ensures that the quality of service of such a system is kept as high as possible. This work presents the study of a peer-to-peer control protocol and its ability to maintain its peers and ability to react to changes while improving the quality of service of the network.