Improved min-cost flow scheduler for mesh-based P2P streaming system

Perceptual visual quality guarantee is of vital concern for the P2P streaming system. One of challenging issues for assuring overall video quality is to design an effective media chunk scheduler. To the best of our knowledge, there is still a lack of studies on integrating video characteristics into P2P media chunk scheduler. In this work, we attempt to integrate video characteristics, i.e. rate-distortion impact, into P2P media chunk scheduler. No more "rarest-first" strategy, "rate-distortion first" strategy (RD-first) is deployed so that the chunks with larger rate-distortion score can be spread more effectively. Predictably, such a strategy can be better against video quality degradation by losing some less important chunks under a bandwidth constrained network. Moreover, to adapt for dynamic networks, we propose a hybrid available bandwidth prober. The simulation results show that received video quality can be substantially improved up to 1.7 dB compared with existing P2P schedulers.