Low Latency Video Streaming Over Peer-To-Peer Networks

We study peer-to-peer multicast streaming, where a source distributes real-time video to a large population of hosts by making use of their forwarding capacity rather than relying on dedicated media servers. We present a distributed streaming protocol which builds and maintains multiple multicast trees. The protocol is combined with an adaptive scheduling algorithm which ensures packets destined to a large number of peers, or particularly important to decode the video, are sent in priority. Experiments carried out over a simulated network of up to 3000 peers illustrate the performance of the protocol. For low latency video streaming, the prioritization algorithm offers performance gains, especially for large audiences and low latencies