Variable chunk size and adaptive scheduling window for P2P streaming of scalable video

Abstract

Inspired by the success of BitTorrent in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, many research groups have proposed extensions of BitTorrent to enable P2P video delivery over the Internet in a time-sensitive manner. However, fixed sized chunks, a feature of the Torrent protocol, leads to inefficiency in application layer framing for error resilient video streaming, since video slices are variable length when encoded at constant quality. This paper proposes two modifications to the Torrent protocol, variable chunk size and adaptive scheduling window, for efficient, error-resilient, adaptive P2P streaming of scalable video. Experimental results show that the proposed modifications yield superior results in terms of number of decoded frames, hence superior quality of experience, in P2P video streaming.