Network coding based live Peer-to-Peer streaming towards minimizing buffering delay

In current live Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming systems, buffering delay is too large compared with the channel switching delay of traditional TV service provided by cable companies. In this paper, network coding is applied to a live P2P streaming system to minimize the buffering delay that users experience. A new scheduling algorithm is designed, with server-push mechanism and intelligent method for determining initial playback point, to make full use of the advantage of network coding. Simulation results show that buffering delay can be reduced to as much as 5 seconds, compared to more than 15 seconds in current systems.