An Approach of Scalable MPEG-4 Video Bitstreams with Network Coding for P2P Swarming System

Current peer-to-peer (P2P) swarming systems have been immensely successful for large scale media content distribution with fewer server resources and lower protocol overhead. In order to improve media delivery quality and provide high service availability, network coding techniques have been proposed to help resource propagating through P2P network. Applying network coding over small time-window of video reduces the risks of uploading duplicate content and minimizes the variance in the performance of each node, thus, improving the overall efficiency of the system. However, by combining network coding in video delivery, the bitrates of media stream is usually nonscalable. Since the channel bandwidth between peers may fluctuate in a wide range in P2P swarming system, nonscalable network coding video stream cannot adapt P2P communication channel effectively. In this work, we propose a novel network coding scheme to address the issues. Considering that MPEG-4 video sequences can be presented by multiple layers of bitstreams, including baselayer and enhanced layer, network coding can be applied on base layer for availability, and enhanced layers can be truncated to adapt channel bandwidth. Compared with existing network coding approaches, our simulation experimental results clearly show that the proposed scheme brings higher efficiency and more flexibility to video streaming over P2P swarming system.