P2P SVC-encoded video streaming based on network coding

Along with rapid development of Internet technologies and widespread adoption of broadband residential access, video streaming service becomes a promising killer application. In order to solve device diversity, scalable video coding (SVC) has been standardized by the Joint Video Team of the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG. Using SVC, each device is capable of determining which layer should be decoded according to its capacities. On the other hand, comparing with traditional client/server architecture, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology can provide high scalability, high resilience, and prevent single point failure. Many studies have been proposed to improve the video quality under different considerations. However, little work has been done on transmitting SVC-encoded video based on P2P mesh topology. In this paper, a P2P SVC-encoded video streaming based on network coding (NC) is proposed. First of all, we propose a novel coding scheme, SVC-NC, for improving error robustness of SVC-encoded video. Second, we apply three scheduling mechanisms based on SVC-NC, startup request scheduling, priority request scheduling, and priority response scheduling to deliver SVC-encoded video more efficiently. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our approach via simulation. The simulation results indicate that our approach can achieve low startup latency, smooth playback, and high video quality.