A Peer-to-Peer Architecture Based on Scalable Video Coding

Combining the advantages of the centralized P2P structure and the data-driven structure with scalable video coding, we propose an adaptive P2P architecture for live video based on scalable wavelet video coding over Internet. The core operations are simple: every peer periodically exchanges data availability and bandwidth information with the central server, acting as the centralized index, which selects and sends a set of partners that have expected data to the demanding node. And the central server classifies one peer to a certain level according to the peer´s downloading bandwidth which coordinates with the layer level of the video data encoded using scalable wavelet coding. The peer retrieves correspondingly unavailable data from partners according to availability information. There are three principal advantages of this architecture: 1) easy to manage, as the server authorizes, classifies, and clusters each new peer according to its bandwidth as it joins the overlay network, and thus the servers maintain a global structure; 2) efficiency in dynamically heterogeneous networks, as users with different processing ability under heterogeneous networks can retrieve the adaptive data from their partner peers according to their downloading bandwidths, and 3) robustness and resilience, as the partner peers can adapt to quick switching among multi-suppliers, and the scalable video transmission is adaptive. A scheduling algorithm is proposed to enable efficient and continuous scalable streaming of low to high bandwidth content with different service levels over heterogeneous networks.