Overlay multi-hop FEC scheme for video streaming over peer-to-peer networks

Overlay networks offer promising capabilities for video streaming, due to their support for application-layer processing at the overlay forwarding nodes. In this paper we propose a novel overlay multi-hop FEC (OM-FEC) scheme that provides FEC encoding/decoding capabilities at intermediate nodes in an overlay path. Based on the current network conditions, the end-to-end overlay path is partitioned into segments, and appropriate FEC codes are applied over those segments. We evaluate our work in a real-world scenario and illustrate that the proposed OM-FEC can outperform a pure end-to-end strategy by 10-15 dB in terms of video PSNR.