1 Network Coding for Content Distribution and Multimedia Streaming in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been one of the most promising platforms to realize the potential of network coding, since end hosts (referred to as peers) at the edge of the Internet have abundant computational resources with modern processors. In this chapter, we take a journey into the application world of network coding in P2P networks, with a focus on two important applications: content distribution and multimedia streaming. For each application, we explore the possible design space of P2P systems with network coding, and provide an intuitive explanation for advantages of using network the coding technique. We further unfold our journey through a discussion of several theoretical results and practical issues.