Peer-to-peer live streaming

Abstract

With the number of Internet users always on the rise, and with Internet connections and related technologies continuously improving, the Internet and World Wide Web has evolved from a simple text based communication tool to a virtual environment that can be used for an endless amount of different activities. Due to the increased speed that has occurred these last few years in broadband Internet connections, today users are capable of transferring data at alarming rates as compared to in previous years. This in tum has opened the door for the possibilities to stream multimedia content over the Internet. The work presented in this project describes the implementation of a peer-to-peer system which is capable of providing live streaming of multimedia content to its peers. The way in which the system has been created requires a peer-to-peer network that is used to handle the peers that constitute the peer-to-peer community whilst another dedicated peer-to-peer network for each individual multimedia item that is being streamed. Finally a means to stream and render the content is also presented.