How to adapt: SVC-based quality adaptation for hybrid peercasting systems

Live streaming of large-scale events such as the Olympic Games with a huge number of viewers is challenging, as the streaming infrastructure needs to scale fast and big, and often in an unpredictable manner. Peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming (Peercasting) has proven to be beneficial in these scenarios, as resources are scaling inherently with the number of nodes. However, churn behavior in a node's neighborhood may result in fluctuating downstream bandwidth and thus freezing (stalling) playback. Related work tries to mitigate this effect by using layered video codecs, focusing on single-dimensional scalability in mesh-pull based systems. Yet, the benefits of multidimensional scalability (resolution, frame rate, and quantization) combined with coexisting pull-/push mechanisms introduced by modern hybrid P2P streaming architectures have not been studied in detail. Consequently, this work proposes a new scheduling algorithm taking these aspects into account. The evaluation shows large benefits for end-users by reducing the frequency of stalls by 90% even under extreme conditions.