Improving the Availability of Scalable on-demand Streams by Dynamic Buffering on P2P Networks

Abstract

In peer-to-peer (P2P) on-demand streaming networks, the alleviation of server load depends on reciprocal stream sharing among peers. In general, on-demand video services enable clients to watch videos from beginning to end. As long as clients are able to buffer the initial part of the video they are watching, on-demand service can provide access to the video to the next clients who request to watch it. Therefore, the key challenge is how to keep the initial part of a video in a peer's buffer for as long as possible, and thus maximize the availability of a video for stream relay. In addition, to address the issues of delivering data on lossy network and providing scalable quality of services for clients, the adoption of multiple description coding (MDC) has been proven as a feasible resolution by much research work. In this paper, we propose a novel caching scheme for P2P on-demand streaming, called Dynamic Buffering. The proposed Dynamic Buffering relies on the feature of MDC to gradually reduce the number of cached descriptions held in a client's buffers, once the buffer is full. Preserving as many initial parts of descriptions in the buffer as possible, instead of losing them all at one time, effectively extends peers’ service time. In addition, this study proposes a description distribution balancing scheme to further improve the use of resources. Simulation experiments show that Dynamic Buffering can make efficient use of cache space, reduce server bandwidth consumption, and increase the number of peers being served.