On Ameliorating the Perceived Playout Quality in Chunk-Driven P2P Media Streaming Systems

Media streaming applications are becoming very popular in the Internet world. Since they mainly rely on a not scalable client/server model, the P2P model is receiving more and more attention as a system to provide media streaming. Different P2P media streaming systems are available, but today the most successful approach seems the chunk-driven P2P model. In such system, the basic assumption is that the media file is divided into several chunks/segments and while playing a segment, the client downloads the following one(s). However, since P2P networks offer no guarantees to the supported applications, inter-segments playout interruption might disruptively affect the perceived playout quality. To mitigate this, we propose a novel approach that uses both low-level audio and video information to divide the video in stand-alone segments. Using real P2P bandwidth aggregate data traffic and a trace-driven simulation, an objective and a subjective evaluation show that if the underlying P2P network causes inter-segments playout delay, the perceived playout quality is less affected if our approach is employed.