Chameleon: Adaptive Peer-to-Peer Streaming with Network Coding

Layered streaming can be used to adapt to the available download capacity of an end-user, and such adaptation is very much required in real world HTTP media streaming. The multiple layer codec has become more refined, as SVC (the scalable extension of the H.264/AVC standard) has been standardized with a bit rate overhead of around 10% and an indistinguishable visual quality, compared to the state of the art single layer codec. Peer-to-peer streaming systems have also become the reality. The important question is how such layered coding can be used in real world peer-to-peer streaming systems. This paper tries to explore the feasibility of using network coding to make layered peer-to-peer streaming much more realistic, by combining network coding and SVC in a fine granularity manner. We present Chameleon, our new peer-to-peer streaming algorithm designed to incorporate network coding seamlessly with SVC. Key components with different design options of Chameleon are presented and experimentally evaluated, with the objective of investigating benefits of network coding in combination with SVC. We carry out extensive experiments on real stream data to (i) evaluate the performance of Chameleon in terms of playback skips and delivered video quality, and (ii) understand its insights. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and bring us one step closer to real adaptive peer-to-peer streaming.