Adaptive P2P video streaming via packet labeling

We consider the scenario of video streaming in peer-to-peer networks. A single media server delivers the video content to a large number of peer hosts by taking advantage of their forwarding capabilities. We propose a scheme that enables the peers to efficiently distribute the media stream among them. Each of the peers connects to the streaming server via multiple multicast trees that provide for robustness in the event of peer disconnection. Moreover, adaptive forwarding of the media content at each peer is enabled by labeling the packets with their importance for the reconstruction of the media stream. We study the performance of the proposed scheme as a function of system parameters such as the play-out delay of the media application, the peer population size and the number of multicast trees employed by the scheme. We show that by placing priorities on forwarding the individual packets at each peer an improved performance is achieved over conventional peer-to-peer systems where no such prioritization is deployed. The gains in performance are particularly significant for low-delay applications and large peer populations.