Video Streaming over a Peer-to-Peer Network

The performance of P2P video streaming systems can be improved by breaking away from the common practice which focuses on designing better control protocols, while ignoring the properties of the transmitted data stream. An alternative is to design adaptive algorithms where encoding and streaming are tailored to the video content and to the network protocol. Although adaptive video encoding and streaming have been studied for a number of years in server-client systems and some of this work was extended to IP multicast, this approach is novel for P2P streaming systems which are still in their infancy. The algorithms we present in this chapter could be used for different P2P control protocols based on multiple multicast trees. In our experiments, we rely on the distributed control protocol presented, in detail, in Chapter 4.