JStreaper: A java adaptive P2P streaming system

Sharing multimedia contents in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has become a common practice. In general, it is done in "download" mode as any other type of data. However, multimedia data present another more convenient consumption mode which is the "streaming" mode: rather than downloading the entire data before viewing it, a stream is initiated from the source peer to the destination one. The advantages of this mode are numerous: latency reduction, continuous viewing, copyright preservation, etc. Nevertheless, due to the huge volume of media files coupled with their stringent timing constraints, P2P media streaming poses multiple challenges especially the streaming load supported by the source peers. The recent advances in computer hardware and the tremendous increase of the network bandwidth have allowed the emergence of pure P2P systems in which each peer could be considered as a "source server". The objective of this paper, through the design and the implementation of a pure P2P system, called JStreaper, is to study from a practical point of view the feasibility of such a system. JStreaper is written purely in Java, which grants it a tremendous portability, great maintaining efficiency and absolute using convenience.