Special issue on advances in 2D/3D Video Streaming Over P2P Networks

Future Media Internet will entail the distribution and dispensation of high quality multimedia content in an efficient, supple, and personalized way through dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Over the last decade Peer-to-Peer (P2P) multimedia communications have gained significant attention by the research community that can be one of the potential enablers of Future Media Internet. In such systems, a client builds complete videos using streams transmitted by multiple senders or peers, instead of relying on a dedicated streaming server. Since receiving peers are also potential senders to other peers, the system capacity grows and the reliance on a single dedicated server shrinks as more peers join the network. Thus, P2P streaming systems have the potential to scale video services to large user communities delivering costeffectiveness and improved Quality-of-Service (QoS) and Quality-of-Experience (QoE). Advanced video processing optimizes coding efficiency by removing available data redundancy and thus introducing higher dependencies among processed data. As a consequence, a critical challenge emerges when robust video transmission over lossy channels is addressed. In P2P systems limited capacity and unreliability of peers impose additional challenges. Therefore, mechanisms are needed to efficiently manage resources contributed by peers and to adapt to the dynamic nature of P2P networking environments. The aim of this special issue is to provide a selected sample of the latest research results aiming at improving endtoend QoE of video transmission over P2P networks. This issue starts with an invited paper that discusses multimedia streaming over P2P based on social norms. It is followed by a survey paper, which examines the current research challenges in P2P video streaming. The remaining papers each propose a unique solution to address the key challenges in 2D/3D video streaming over P2P. The invited paper by Y. Zhang and M. van der Schaar ‘‘Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Sharing based on Social Norms’’ proposes a novel family of incentive protocols in P2P system by exploiting social norms. In these proposed protocols, each peer gets the social norm rewards and punishment