Layered peer-to-peer streaming

In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer streaming solution to address the on-demand media distribution problem. We identify two issues, namely the asynchrony of user requests and heterogeneity of peer network bandwidth. Our key techniques to address these two issues are cache-and-relay and layer-encoded streaming. A unique challenge of layered peer-to-peer streaming is that the bandwidth and data availability (number of layers received) of each receiving peer are constrained and heterogeneous, which further limits the bandwidth and data availability of its downstream node when it acts as the supplying peer. This challenge distinguishes our work from existing studies on layered multicast. Our experiments show that our solution is efficient at utilizing bandwidth resource of supplying peers, scalable at saving server bandwidth consumption, and optimal at maximizing streaming qualities of all peers.