Peer-Assisted Media Streaming: A Holistic Review

This chapter presents a holistic review of recent research advances in peer-assisted streaming systems, including both live and on-demand streaming. We approach this task by first presenting design objectives of streaming systems in general, and then discuss differences between live and on-demand streaming. These common and different design objectives motivate the protocol design space in streaming systems, in categories of peer selection, segment scheduling, and distributed caching protocols. We present main results from the existing literature in each of these dimensions, with a particular focus on the pivotal role of network coding within such a protocol design space. We conclude the chapter with an outlook towards future research directions, especially in the application of network coding in peer-assisted streaming systems.