A case for 3D streaming on peer-to-peer networks

Abstract

One of the most serious issues holding back the widespread of 3D contents on Internet has been their inaccessibility due to large data volume. Many compression and progressive transmission techniques, as well as format standards, have been proposed in recent years to make 3D streaming increasingly viable for the efficient and accessible delivery of 3D contents. However, existing proposals have yet to seriously address one of the most important issues in practical adoption - a system's scalability in terms of the number of concurrent users. We argue that due to 3D contents' large data volume and interactive nature, client-server architecture, with its inherently fixed resource availability and high cost, will not be suitable to support popular Internet-scale 3D streaming. On the other hand, peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures hold the promise of both scalability and affordability. In this position paper, we describe the potential promises and challenges in adapting 3D streaming to P2P networks, using multi-user networked virtual environment (NVE) as an example. We also propose Flowing LoD (FLoD), a scalable, distributed and fault-tolerant P2P 3D streaming mechanism, that is based on Voronoi-based Overlay Network (VON), a P2P overlay specifically designed for NVE applications.