Peer-to-peer live video streaming on the internet: issues, existing approaches, and challenges [Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming]

TLDR

Live video streaming remains an unfulfilled promise of the Internet, with many technical innovations yet no system delivering scale and quality; user dissatisfaction stems from the Internet’s autonomous nature, instability, lack of guarantees, bandwidth constraints, and continuity demands. The article reviews current P2P live video‑streaming technologies, their historical evolution, and offers observations on future development. The authors analyze P2P live video‑streaming technologies, drawing on their experience with the large‑scale Coolstreaming system. P2P‑based streaming has proven cost‑effective, scalable, and easy to deploy; the authors summarize key innovations and trade‑offs from their Coolstreaming system and provide insights for future development.

Abstract

Live video streaming is perhaps the greatest unfulfilled promise of the Internet. There have been tremendous efforts in the design and experimentation of video-streaming systems in the past two decades; there have been no shortage of technical innovations, yet no single system has delivered the scale and service quality. The fundamental problem that throttles the large-scale deployment of Internet video streaming is the dissatisfaction end-users experience with performance. This is caused by a combination of many factors, such as the autonomous nature of the Internet, inherent instability, and lack of a service guarantee. This is further challenged by sustainable bandwidth and the stringent continuity requirements of streaming applications. Recent development of P2P-based streaming technology brings unprecedented new momentum to Internet video streaming, which has been shown to be cost-effective, scalable, and easy to deploy. This article reviews the state-of-the-art P2P live video-streaming technologies and their development from a historic perspective. Based on our earlier success with a large-scale P2P streaming system, Coolstreaming, we summarize the main innovations and discuss the key trade offs in the system design. We present our observations on the future development and offer a few insights for further discussion.