An unequal error protection scheme for reliable peer-to-peer scalable video streaming

•This paper proposes a systematic error protection scheme, involving packet-loss modeling, receiver-driven JSCC, and sender-driven peer selection. In the proposed scheme, given an estimated system uplink capacity, a receiver-driven JSCC mechanism is proposed by which each child-peer minimize its received visual distortion by subscribing to an appropriate amount of source and channel coding packets. To maximize the uplink bandwidth of peers, parent-peers can adaptively select child-peers to transmit subscribed packets according to the rate-distortion contribution of the subscriptions requested from child-peers.•This paper also proposes a scheme for accurately and stably estimating the parent peers’ average uplink capacity based on consensus propagation rather than estimating the average available uplink bandwidth of neighboring peers, which is usually unstable due to the dynamics of neighboring peers and thereby leads to fluctuating allocations of JSCC.

This paper proposes an unequal error protection (UEP) scheme for transporting scalable video packets over packet-lossy peer-to-peer networks. In our scheme, given an estimated system uplink capacity, a receiver-driven joint source-channel coding (JSCC) mechanism is proposed by which each child-peer minimizes the received visual distortion by subscribing to appropriate numbers of source and channel coding packets. Because the bandwidth for inter-peer transmissions may fluctuate largely due to peer dynamics, in our method, a peer estimates the available system uplink capacity based on consensus propagation to avoid the fluctuating allocations of JSCC. To efficiently utilize the uplink bandwidth of peers, parent-peers utilize sender-driven contribution-guided peer selection to reject the low-contribution subscriptions requested from candidate child-peers. Simulation results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the visual quality, compared to other state-of-the-art schemes.