P2P and MPEG FGS Encoding: A Good Recipe for Multipoint Video Transmission on the Internet
In the last years Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have gained ground for content sharing between communities, determining a real revolution on the Internet. The characteristics of P2P systems make them a very good choice for multimedia content distribution over IP networks. However, although P2P technolo...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Wiley
2009-01-01
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| Series: | International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2009/453471 |
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| Summary: | In the last years Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have gained ground for content
sharing between communities, determining a real revolution on the Internet.
The characteristics of P2P systems make them a very good choice for multimedia
content distribution over IP networks. However, although P2P technology gives
new opportunities to define an efficient multimedia streaming application, at
the same time it involves a set of technical challenges and issues due to the
best-effort service offered by the Internet and its dynamic and heterogeneous
nature. The most of existent protocols for video communications over P2P
mainly focus on tree topology maintenance, without paying any attention to
the encoding problem. The idea of this paper is to propose a multipoint video broadcast framework
over a heterogeneous content distribution P2P network. In the proposed system
the source generates the video flow by using an MPEG-4/FGS encoder, in such
a way that no losses occur at the Baselayer stream even in the presence of
short-term bandwidth fluctuations. Although in the past the FGS was not
employed due to its encoding complexity, today, thanks to advances in hardware
technology, we were able to develop an MPEG-4/FGS encoder on low-cost PCs
which turned out to be more feasible and appealing for its flexibility.
The FGS layer is sent together with the Base layer, but with a lower priority.
The source uses a rate controller to regulate the encoding rate of the
Base layer. To this aim, a protocol is defined in order to provide the source
with information related to the most stringent bottleneck link on the overlay
network. A technique to reorganize the content distribution tree is proposed
and discussed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework a case
study is introduced; improvements obtained with respect to several reference
cases where FGS is not applied are also shown. |
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| ISSN: | 1687-7578 1687-7586 |