A Comparison Study of Block Scheduling Algorithms in P2P-VoD Systems

Video-on-Demand streaming on P2P networks has become increasingly popular in recent years. This report presents a comparison study of block scheduling algorithms in P2P VoD networking. Global rarest-first and a promising technique named network coding are reviewed and simulated. The influence of the size of blocks to the performance is also covered in the simulation. The results confirm that without any knowledge of global block distribution, network coding can achieve at least the same performance with global rarest-first, which was considered to be the optimal solution in block scheduling but required global information that was unknowable in many P2P systems. And with smaller pieces, if ignoring overheads, both of Global rarest-first and network coding will achieve better performance.