A Peer-to-Peer Approach for Remote Rendering and Image Streaming in Walkthrough Applications

Motivated by the widespread of file and video streaming over peer-to-peer networks, we propose to investigate the design of a peer-to-peer solution for image-based remote walkthrough. Due to the fact that our scheme relies on images to provide the user with interactive virtual environments, even thin mobile devices can benefit from image-based rendering's lower graphics power demand when compared to geometry rendering. The main objective of this paper is to present our remote walk through system and discuss a simple peer-to-peer distribution algorithm. Similar to peer-to-peer networked virtual environment solutions, our approach involves discovering neighboring peers using region of interest, instead of proximity of peer nodes. The main idea is that closer virtual users will have higher probability for sharing images, as they are navigating in the same region. We also discuss our previous buffering and scheduling mechanisms and how they work in a peer-to-peer environment. We also discuss our simulation experiments in order to evaluate the performance of our approach.