Peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and caching service

Abstract

Reducing initial delay of playing time, delay jitter during playing time, and network bandwidth utilization is important for multimedia streaming service. In order to achieve these two goals, our peer-to-peer multimedia caching service exploits the proximity of set of clients and temporal and spatial locality of cached streams on the clients. Peer clients, which are fully connected together, not only receive multimedia streams from a server, but also send cached streams to peer clients like a proxy server upon its request. All information about the peer clients, and video segment they cache, quality of connections, are maintained by a cache service via the publish/subscribe protocols. This paper shows approaches for multimedia streaming, streaming scheduling, pre-fetching and switching streaming clients in the collaborative environment of peer-to-peer clients. Our simulation results show provisioning small initial delay and low jitter during playing time.