Robust video-on-demand streaming in peer-to-peer environments

This paper presents a new video-on-demand streaming technique in peer-to-peer (P2P) environments. While a number of P2P live video streaming techniques have been proposed in the past, we argue that the two types of video streaming, live and on-demand, have some subtle differences. Most notably, a P2P video-on-demand streaming technique has to handle the asynchronous arrival of peers efficiently, and provide robust recovery under the rather frequent peers’ failure. Our answer to the challenge is an application multicast tree, called P2VoD (Peer-To-peer for Video-On-Demand streaming). P2VoD proposes a number of ideas, including a caching scheme, a generation concept, and a distributed directory service. Through analytical analysis, we show that P2VoD is sound and efficient. We also compare P2VoD against a recently proposed P2Cast system by Guo et al. [Y. Guo, K. Suh, J.F. Kurose, D.F. Towsley, P2cast: peer-to-peer patching scheme for vod service., in: WWW, 2003, pp. 301–309] using both analytical analysis and simulation. The result shows that P2VoD performs better than P2Cast in a number of important performance metrics.