Smooth delivery of layered video stream in P2P networks

Abstract

Layered streaming in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has drawn great interests since not only it can accommodate a large number of users but also it handles heterogeneities of peers. However, there's still a lack of comprehensive study on smoothing and layer selection for layered streaming. In this work, we aim to smooth the layered stream by selecting the appropriate layers and reducing the amplitude and frequency of layer changes. We propose three objectives that should be achieved by our proposed mechanism: smoothing, minimizing useless chunk ratio and handling bandwidth fluctuation. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed mechanism provides a significant improvement in the received video quality in terms of lowering the number of layer changes and useless layers chunks.