Robust and Scalable P2P Streaming for Future Media Internet

Abstract. Future Media Internet will require to share and distribute high quality multimedia contents and services in a flexible, efficient and personalized way through dynamic and heterogeneous environments. One approach for fulfilling this is by means of taking advantage of P2P distribution techniques and the use of source coding techniques such as MDC and SVC. This paper discusses these issues based on the real experience of the authors and highlights their applicability in Future Media Internet initiatives in order to solve future challenges. Keywords. Media, Streaming, MDC, SVC, P2P, Future Internet Introduction The impact of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic is growing fast and supposes the major part of current Internet traffic. However, today, video streaming applications are the bandwidth most-hungry applications and this tendency is envisaged to grow exponentially, even more with P2P streaming applications. P2P technology, as an alternative to traditional client-server model, has provided a scalable framework for any kind of content distribution. Currently, this kind of applications are arousing great interest both in academic research and industry. In fact, P2P inherently solves some problems considered in Future Internet discussion [1][2]. P2P techniques offer important benefits in terms of scalability, robustness, fault-tolerance, self-organization, low-cost deployment, etc. However, they still have to cope with important challenges [7] due to the heterogeneity and dynamicity of this kind of networks. Nowadays, there are initiatives such as P4P (Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P) [3], DSN (Distributed Services Network)[4] or PPSP (Peer-to-Peer Streaming Protocol) [5], which are supported by industrial and developers of P2P applications, which try to take advantage of applying P2P techniques in the proposal of new ISP architectures for content distribution or creating new standardized protocols for streaming media over the Internet, thus solving some interoperability issues among applications. In this context, we have been working in the distribution of media contents in Peer-to-Peer applications. Our experience is focused in the study and application of source coding techniques, concretely in the use of Multiple Description Coding (MDC) and Scalable Video Coding (SVC) in P2P applications. We have experimented and checked the correct operation of these techniques in P2P environments and observed the benefits in terms of robustness and scalability. Robustness is given by introducing some redundancy in the information, which is going to be distributed through multiple