Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming of Non-Uniform Bitrate with Guaranteed Delivery Hops

Abstract

In conventional video streaming systems, various kind of video streams are delivered from a dedicated server (e.g., edge server) to the subscribers so that a video stream of higher quality level is encoded with a higher bitrate. In this paper, we consider the problem of delivering those video streams with the assistance of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology with as small server cost as possible while keeping the performance of video streaming in terms of the throughput and the latency. The basic idea of the proposed method is to divide a given video stream into several sub-streams called stripes as evenly as possible and to deliver those stripes to the subscribers through different tree-structured overlays. Such a stripe-based approach could average the load of peers, and could effectively resolve the overloading of the overlay for high quality video streams. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated numerically. The result of evaluations indicates that the proposed method significantly reduces the server cost necessary to guarantee a designated delivery hops, compared with a naive tree-based scheme.