Strategies of buffering schedule in P2P VoD streaming

Abstract

As compared to live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming, modern P2P video-on-demand (VoD) systems have brought much larger volumes of videos and more interactive controls to the Internet users. As the increase of bitrate of the videos and the full VCR controls of P2P VoD, the behavior “buffering” motivates us to design different schedule and service strategies for peers, to improve the playback performance, and the alleviation of the dedicated streaming server, by making best use of the bandwidth and cache capacities of these buffering peers. In our design, peers strategically decide which segments in the video to download first, and which requests to serve first. We conduct extended simulations to evaluate the performance of the strategies, and the results show our design outperforms the conventional sequential scheme, with respect to improving the playback quality and reducing the server load.