Towards a P2P videoconferencing system based on low-delay network coding

We present ToroStream, our P2P video streaming protocol designed around Network Coding (NC), and we investigate its applicability to low-delay applications such as live video streaming and videoconferencing. While NC offers several benefits for P2P content distribution, the coding operations at the network nodes introduce a delay that is detrimental for low-delay communications. To this end, we designed a push-based packet scheduling mechanism devised to minimize the communication delay. Furthermore, our protocol is designed around a low computational complexity class of rateless codes that enable us to experiment on real networks where the nodes have limited computational capabilities. That enables us to experiment with two typical low-delay applications such as live video streaming and videoconferencing in a realistic network scenario. The experiments show that our protocol enables continuous playback with limited initial delay and we point out the issues that NC poses in low-delay applications.