On Peer Selection and Protection for Reliable Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming

P2P live video streaming is an emerging technique for video-ondemand services. In a P2P network, the bandwidth, memory, and computation ability of peers are redistributed to provide large-scale services. The key concept of P2P streaming is that each peer should forward the received data to its neighboring peers. However, peers might unexpectedly join and leave the P2P network, namely, peer churns, which can seriously disturb the video bitstream sharing. When a parent peer leaves, the receiving peers must find a replacement peer in time; otherwise, the receiving peers cannot resume their video transport. In addition, peers that connect to those receiving peers will also be influenced. This effect is known as chain reaction. In this paper, we propose a new P2P streaming method involving peer selection, video coding, and packet protection. Simulation results show that our proposed method can achieve better video quality and more reliable P2P video streaming compared to existing schemes.