P2P Video Streaming Strategies based on Scalable Video Coding

Abstract

Video streaming over the Internet has gained significant popularity during the last years, and the academy and industry have realized a great research effort in this direction. In this scenario, scalable video coding (SVC) has emerged as an important video standard to provide more functionality to video transmission and storage applications. This paper proposes and evaluates two strategies based on scalable video coding for P2P video streaming services. In the first strategy, SVC is used to offer differentiated quality video to peers with heterogeneous capacities. The second strategy uses SVC to reach a homogeneous video quality between different videos from different sources. The obtained results show that our proposed strategies enable a system to improve its performance and introduce benefits such as differentiated quality of video for clients with heterogeneous capacities and variable network conditions.