Scalable Video Delivery over Peer-to-Peer Network

Abstract

Video streaming over the Internet or Internet TV are gaining popularity due to widespread deployment of broadband access. Conventionally client-server and content delivery networks (CDN) are used for video streaming. The client-server system fails to address the large user base and CDN requires very large infrastructural support. The large user base and _ash crowd are common scenario for famous programs such as Football match, cricket match, etc,. There is a very large bandwidth and network resources available among the group of users interested in similar programs. This can be exploited to extend support for video streaming using peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The BitTorrent protocol used for content/_le sharing is successful in this direction and widely accepted covering over 60% of the Internet traffic. The same protocol can’t be used for video streaming due to real-time constraints. There were several research efforts to modify this version of the protocol to support video and Tribler is one among the widely accepted protocol. The heterogeneity associated with user end and extremely varying P2P bandwidth jeopardize the video streaming and reduces the quality of service (QoS). Hence video needs to be coded in scalable manner in order to support for easy adaptation within the network as per arising dynamic requirements. The success story of scalable video coding (SVC) is realized as a standard in 2007 and named as H.264/SVC. It supports various granularities of scalability such as resolution, frame rate and quality scalability. Streaming of scalable video over P2P network is a current hot topic for research and this tutorial is designed to give overall idea of SVC streaming in P2P. The BitTorrent protocol can be used for downloading and watching any video. During this the different part of the video arrives at different instant of time, hence does not supports live streaming. The modified BitTorrent can be used for Video on Demand (VoD) application (e.g. YouTube). In this the video chunks are classified as urgent range and future range depending on the playback position. The urgent chunks are downloaded sequentially and future chunks are downloaded by rarest first order. In the case of real-time video streaming (Internet TV), the generation, downloading and viewing happens continuously without interrupting playback. In case of P2P network, the peer may be heterogeneous.