Multi-stream 3D video distribution over peer-to-peer networks

The recent advances in stereoscopic video capture, compression, and display have made 3-dimensional (3D) video a visually appealing and costly affordable technology. There have been a series of pioneer works on streaming 3D video over the Internet. Yet the remarkably increased data volume of 3D videos poses great challenges to the conventional client/server design, which has already suffered from supporting 2D videos.In this paper, we present an initial attempt toward efficient streaming of 3D videos over a peer-to-peer network. We show that the inherent multi-stream nature of 3D video makes playback synchronization more difficult, which is particularly acute with the existence of multiple senders in a peer-to-peer overlay. We address this by a novel 2-stream 2-stage buffer design, together with weighted data scheduling and light-weight synchronization. We further discuss a series of key practical issues toward implementing our peer-to-peer 3D video streaming system, including the weight modeling for data segments, the interactions with the RTP/RTCP protocol stack, and the inter-operability with monoscopic video as well as extension to multi-view video. We have evaluated the performance of our system under different end-system and network configurations with typical 3D video streams. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our system in terms of both scalability and streaming quality.