Multiple description Peer-to-Peer video streaming using coalitional games

Among the recent solutions for Peer-to-Peer video streaming, Multiple Description Coding (MDC) has proved to be an effective solution since it is able to support high flexibility in the network topology and to grant an interruption-free fruition of multimedia contents. However, the presence of losses and congestions on the different links may preclude the reconstruction of the transmitted sequence at the end terminal with a satisfying visual quality. Differentiating the Quality-of-Service levels permits mitigating these inconveniences but requires distributed packet classifications performed by each peer independently. The packet labelling can be modelled via cooperative games where the different uploading nodes are players/descriptions competing for the available network resources. Recent results have shown that cooperative strategies perform better in terms of Quality-of-Experience with respect to non-cooperative and state-of-the-art packet labelling strategies.