An Efficient Hybrid Push-Pull Based Protocol for VOD In Peerto-Peer network

Abstract

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client-server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques for video on demand (VOD) have been shown to be a good enhancement to the traditional client/server methods when trying to reduce costs, increase robustness and solve the scalability issues. Various challenges arise when building a resilient P2P video on demand systems, such as long waiting time to receive the video segments and the quality of service. A new proposed data exchange schema is called Efficient Hybrid Push-Pull based Protocol (EHP3) can reduce the initial playback delay and improve the quality of service. The downstream peer has to accelerate the downloading process of the urgent segments, i.e. those missing segments which are near their playback time. The range of the urgent segments is referred to as the priority region. The upstream peers give a strict priority to segments within the priority region. If the downstream peer has sufficient download bandwidth, it should be able to completely receive these urgent segments before playback time. If there are no missing segments in the priority region, the downstream peer uses the pull protocol to download the missing segments which are outside the priority region. The simulation result shows that the proposed data exchange schema (EHP3) can reduce the initial play back delay and reduce the burden on the server side by increasing the number of caching segments in the playback buffer. Moreover, the proposed schema improves the quality of service by reducing the number of skipped segments during the playback.