Real-time video delivery using peer-to-peer bartering networks and multiple description coding

Broadband Internet access using ADSL or cable modems provides sufficient bandwidth for real-time video streaming. If television channels could be distributed on the Internet, each channel would get a world wide audience. However, television distribution from a single sender does not scale and IP-level multicasting is complex and costly. We propose a solution based on application-level multicasting using a P2P network, called P2P-TV. Each peer receives a video stream and must also forward this stream to others. This work presents an architecture for streaming video. Our P2P-TV proposal aims to solve three problems that are currently not addressed in other P2P streaming proposals, namely 1) maximizing the usage of all available peer bandwidth, 2) taking current network conditions into account (network awareness), and 3) the freeriding problem. Multiple description coding is an integral part of our solution. By splitting the video stream into smaller streams we can utilize all the bandwidth of a peer. Multiple streams allow more efficient adaptation of the multicast tree to current network conditions. Bittorrent-like bartering of content is also enabled by using multiple streams.