Using Bittorrent and SVC for efficient video sharing and streaming
Résumé
While video streaming and multimedia content sharing dominate the Internet traffic, and Internet becomes widely accessible to wired, mobile and wireless networks, it is important to design a system that can ensure video streaming and sharing across variable network conditions for users with different access devices. Researchers addressed these challenges by using servers, CDN, or peer-to-peer (P2P) approaches in order to deal with the large bandwidth consumption and the increasing number of multimedia consumers, and using different coding techniques such as Scalable Video Coding (SVC) or Multiple Description Coding (MDC) to adapt the stream to the client's network and terminal characteristics. However, few of those systems support the client's generated content and sharing behavior, and at the same time provide means for user preference stream adaptation. In this paper, we combine P2P file-sharing and SVC to provide an efficient video sharing and streaming system. Our solution consists of an SVC extension of the popular Bittorrent protocol, where the video streams can embed different qualities, and the peers choose the more suitable quality for their capabilities. Giving the constraints imposed by the streaming and multi-layer SVC, and in order to provide a high QoS for the end users, we propose many optimizations to organize the overlay, on both peer and tracker sides. The results, obtained by means of simulation, show that our system outperforms the case when using AVC (Advanced Video Coding) in terms of the QoS perceived by the peers, while we studied the scalability issues of this solution