Re-Transport Media A Peer-to-Peer Streaming Solution

In this paper we propose Re-Transport Media (RTM), a peer-to-peer streaming architecture which amortizes the bandwidth costs of serving internet media by cooperatively distributing the streaming load among connected clients. Conventional media streaming architectures typically impose significant bandwidth load on the server’s Internet uplink, requiring the content provider to serve the stream to all end-users. In recent work, systems use an application-layer multicasting protocol and place clients in layered clusters to implement efficient contentdistribution. RTM improves upon existing systems by reducing control traffic to constant time, using a centralized tracker to maintain an organized client tree structure. We create a functional peer-to-peer radio implementation of the RTM design as a proof-of-concept which uses the Shoutcast streaming protocol. The implications of RTM are widespread: RTM eases the bandwidth burden on current content providers, enables providers to broadcast higher-fidelity media streams, and empowers ordinary users with modest bandwidth to become content providers.