Quality Adaptation in P2P TV Based on Scalable Video Coding

Recently, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques for Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) have attracted a lot of attention due to their high potential at improving the performance of today's multimedia systems. In this paper, we propose a novel concepts and mechanisms that enable the use of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) in Peer-to-Peer Television (P2PTV) system to achieve the quality adaptation. Using SVC, we have developed a two-stage quality adaptation algorithm that matches the video quality with available local and system resources. Key components with different our design options are presented and experimentally evaluated, with the objective of investigating benefits of network P2P in combination with SVC. We have carried out extensive experiments on real stream data to (i) evaluate the performance of our design in terms of adapted video stream SVC with available resources (ii) more robustness against high churn rates, heterogeneous peers, and flash crowd scenarios. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and bring us one step closer to real adaptive peer-to-peer streaming.