Playback-Rate Segment Scheduling Algorithm in MoD P2P Streaming Services

To leverage the scalability of Media-on-Demand (MoD) Peer to Peer (P2P) streaming services, it's a critical challenge to propose a segment scheduling algorithm for ensuring that a packet must be successfully received before its decoding deadline for the packet to contribute to the reconstructed media quality, and efficiently making use of limited network bandwidth. Most of previous works adopt a greedy approach for maximizing the received number of segments by making full use of the available network bandwidth to make that a peer can receive its requested segments as soon as possible. However, the greedy approach will cause the traffic burst on the network and adversely decrease the network capacity. They also suffer from needing larger disk memory for storing the received segments which are not played yet. To address the two issues for efficiently using the limited network bandwidth and saving disk memory, this paper proposes a distinct segment scheduling algorithm by scheduling the segments evenly transmitted into the network according to the playback rate of the MoD streaming service. The proposed algorithm only schedules an enough amount of segments for satisfying the playback rate of the requested streaming service. Further, to disseminate segments quickly, the rare segments available at few peers will be also scheduled.