Adaptive peer-to-peer video streaming with optimized flexible multiple description coding

Abstract

Efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming is a challenging task due to time-varying nature of both the number of available peers and network/channel conditions. To this effect, we propose a receiver driven P2P streaming system which utilizes a flexible scalable multiple description coding method [1], where the number of base and enhancement descriptions, and the rate and redundancy level of each description can be adapted on the fly. The optimization of the parameters of the proposed MDC scheme according to network conditions is discussed within the context of the proposed adaptive P2P streaming framework, where the number and quality of available streaming peers/paths are a priori unknown and vary in time. Experimental results, by means of NS-2 network simulation of a P2P video streaming system, show that adaptation of the number, type, and rate of descriptions and the redundancy level of each description according to network conditions yields significantly superior performance when compared to MDC schemes using a fixed number of descriptions/layers with fixed rate and redundancy level.