Cooperative P2P Video Streaming for Mobile Peers

Abstract

Near-live P2P video streaming is already popular among consumers, but typically this type of application is bound to fixed Internet access, as streaming requires a sustained bitrate over time and is less tolerant to environments with volatile throughput rates. For users moving at speeds larger than walking speed, P2P video streaming is hardly possible, as the achievable throughput for a single peer is insufficient to obtain the video. When multiple peers are interested in the same video stream and they are moving along the same path, they could cooperatively retrieve chunks, instead of acting independently. The participating peers will need to bundle their achievable throughput and coordinate the chunk retrieval. We present such a cooperative P2P video streaming system, introducing a new scheduler and develop a light-weight throughput estimator. 3G cellular link measurements and a simulation study demonstrate the feasibility of our approach for a train scenario.