Inferring playback rate and rate resets of P2P video streaming transmissions by piecewise line envelope approximation

Conventionally, P2P video is regarded as CBR traffic. However, our measurements have shown that the rate reset cannot be neglected in a practical IPTV system because each rate reset often leads to performance degradation. Thus, addressing the problem of inferring playback rate and rate reset in a P2P video system is significant. In this article, an algorithm termed piecewise linear envelope approximation (PLEA) is proposed, in which a follow-up time is introduced to smooth rate fluctuations in a small time scale and to adapt rate jumps in a large time scale automatically. With the PLEA algorithm, discontinuity introduced by blind segmentations adopted by current methods is avoided. Furthermore, unlike existing algorithms in which both segmentation and combinations are performed in multiple runs, only a single computation path is involved in the PLEA algorithm. This makes PLEA algorithm amenable to implementation of low complexity by either software or hardware. Both theoretical analysis and experiment based on measured data show that the PLEA outperforms existing algorithms based on segmentation.