Layered video multicast with a P2P cooperation approach

With the rapid development of wireless networking technology, real time video multicast applications have become feasible. These applications are bandwidth hungry and have stringent delay constraints. Furthermore, in wireless networks, different users generally have different receiving capabilities. Therefore, it is challenging to provide scalable support for such applications. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose to use layered video and a P2P mode approach. In our solution, a video is encoded into multiple layers and broadcast to the multicast group users. Users form a P2P network to recover the loss of multicast video packets. This can significantly improve the overall received video quality. More importantly, our solution can provide incentives for users to help each other. With the proposed scheme, when a user helps another one, it can also improve its own received video quality.