Hybrid Buffering Scheme for P2P Based VoD System

How to improve the scalability and QoS of peer-to-peer on-demand streaming system based on unstructured overlay is still a problem. Researchers have proposed some memory based buffering schemes to archive the targets. Considering the limited space of memory on one peer, a new caching strategy, which can integrate memory-caching strategy with disk-caching strategy, is proposed to make full use of peers memory, disk and bandwidth resources. Based on the new strategy, peers can request media data from neighbors of the overlay, buffer the fresh part into the memory slots and the watched part into the free local disk, which can enlarge the capacity to buffer media data. Based on the new scheme, the experimental results show that the new caching strategy improves the service capacity and QoS of the whole system greatly. The load of the media server is obviously alleviated and the continuity of playing media data is obviously improved.