A Self-Organized Structured Overlay Network for Video Streaming

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file downloading and streaming applications have recently attracted a large number of users on the Internet. Currently, several P2P video streaming systems have been deployed to reduce the cost at server. They are classified into two categories live and on-demand streaming systems. The live streaming systems disseminate live video contents to all peers in real time. On the other hand, the on-demand video (VoD) streaming system enables peers to enjoy the flexibility of watching video. It realizes the goal of watch whatever you want, whenever you want. The current P2P-VoD systems cannot realize such goals efficiently. This chapter proposes a self-organized structured overlay network of peers to realize that goal and improve performance. Each peer is able to cache some video minutes associated with the current media being played. The proposed overlay network is organized into clusters. Each cluster contains peers with overlapped buffer windows where their playing points are located between lower and upper play point limits. When a peer in the cluster moves its play point within the limits, for example by performing a seek operation, it then can rapidly discover and fetch the required blocks for the playback buffer from peers in the same cluster. Clusters improve both discovery and fetch overheads. However, it needs cluster management overhead.