PileCast: Multiple bit rate live video streaming over BitTorrent

Abstract

In recent years, the demand for live video streaming has steadily increased. Unfortunately, current video streaming architectures embody a number of drawbacks, which impact the quality of live video streaming and place a heavy demand on the video streaming server. Client–server architectures engender issues of network congestion, server bottlenecks and load-balancing, often leading to poor quality video playback at the client and thus making them inappropriate for live video streaming. Moreover, most live video streaming systems offer only a single, fixed bit rate video stream, which is typically not appropriate for all clients. If this bit rate is too high, then some clients may not possess sufficient bandwidth to view the video stream. Conversely, if it is set too low, then all clients will receive a low quality video stream, even those whose bandwidth can support a higher standard. The aforementioned issues can be addressed using multiple bit rate video streaming, thereby allowing clients to download content at a rate appropriate for their bandwidth. This paper focuses on the utilization of a BitTorrent-based, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture, which mitigates the load on the video streaming server whilst supporting multiple bit rate live video streaming. Using this architecture, each client is able to share the responsibility of the streaming server by providing part of the steamed video content to other clients. Simulations conducted indicate that the proposed architecture offers better performance than both: the client–server approach and current P2P-based live video streaming systems.